13. How to Think High Profit Thoughts

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to Episode 13 of How to Make More Money. I’m your host Kelly Hollingsworth and I’m super glad you’re here. Today we’re talking about HOW TO THINK HIGH PROFIT THOUGHTS, and we’re going to cover four important things. The first is, what is a high-profit thought? The second is, why you should think high-profit thoughts. And the third thing is I’m going to give you some examples—three examples–of high-profit thoughts that you may not have thought of before, but that are super helpful to making money. And the last thing is how to get help with high-profit thinking. Spoiler alert. The way you do it is you join my in my one-of-a-kind coaching program Gateway to Seven, because this is one of the seven essential skills you will learn in there–the skill of high-profit thinking.

What is a high-profit thought?

Okay so now let’s dive into our first question. What is a high profit thought? To understand what it is, picture yourself on a road. This road is your heroic journey from low-profit business owner to high-profit business owner.

The high-profit thoughts in your head are the ideas and opinions that get you to that high-profit happy ending as quickly as possible, and in the most pleasant way possible.

The low-profit thoughts are the ideas and opinions that don’t get you there. They are the ruts in the road that catch your wheel and keep you stuck. If the ruts are really deep, they can high-center you so that when you’re theoretically taking action, in truth you’re just spinning your wheels. Low-profit thoughts are often the ideas and opinions that are just dead-wrong about the way the world works. They have you thinking this is the way, when in truth you are heading away from your money.

The insidious nature of low-profit thoughts

So now that you know the difference between high-profit thoughts and low-profit thoughts, let’s pause and consider the insidious nature of low-profit thoughts.

Low-Profit thoughts are insidious because they develop gradually and they become well-established without you noticing what’s happening, and while this is happening, their treacherous nature remains unseen. Here’s an example from my husband’s life. My husband and I used to love to go out for crab legs. We’d go at least twice a month. And when he would order his crab legs, he would douse each bite of crab in lemon and melted butter, and then wash it down with a generous swig of a nice microbrew.

This was one of our favorite things to do–go out for crab legs. But during this time that we were doing this, over the course of years, he always felt like he was coming down with the flu. For a long time, he chalked it up to being a commercial pilot. He flies for a major airline. And he was thinking, I’m in and out of airports and planes and hotels all the time. It’s no wonder I don’t feel well. Maybe I’m not getting enough sleep, either. So for the longest time he just let this go, but life was getting more and more difficult, and it finally got so bad that he decided, I have to figure out what’s going on here. How can I be sick all the time?

So what did he do? He went to the doctor and they did some food sensitivity and allergy testing, but none of the information gleaned from those tests was helpful. So he embarked on a path of research . My husband’s research skills are legendary. When he buys an electric bike or a motorcycle or a car, all of his friends just call him up and ask, “What did you buy?” And they buy exactly the same thing, because they know what he picked out is going to be the best.

In this research process of why he was feeling bad all the time, he discovered the Cadillac of food sensitivity tests, and he worked it out with his doctor to get that test. It was pretty involved because the doctor wasn’t even set up to use this company’s testing procedure. But finally they got it all set up and he went in and took the test. And when the test finally came back, it revealed that he is very allergic to two things: dairy and brewer’s yeast– two of the main ingredients in our frequent crab leg feasts. Butter and beer were the worst things he could consume.

But what were we doing? We would go out for crab legs and he would eat butter and drink beer and then feel terrible for a week or 10 days. And then when he started feeling better, we would think, Yay! You’re feeling better. Let’s go for crab legs and beer to celebrate.

And the whole cycle would begin again. So why am I telling you this story? Because it illustrates the insidious nature of low-profit thoughts. You have an idea or opinion that the thing you’re doing is innocuous. That it’s fun. That is a great thing to do, because this isn’t hurting you, and it might even be helping you a lot. . You might even think it’s good for you. But you’re dead wrong. And you’re not making the connection between that idea or opinion, and the illness that you’re suffering as a result of holding that idea or opinion. In the case of money, you’re not connecting that your ideas and opinions about making money are actually leading you away from your money.

This is a funny thing that happens in many of my coaching sessions. My clients are telling me, all the time, “I never know what you’re going to say,” but when I say it, they can see that whatever they’ve been thinking, the opinion or belief that they’ve been holding, is actually the reverse of what it takes to make money.

What I want you to take away from this example with my husband is that it works exactly the same way in your business.

The life-changing effect of high-profit thoughts

When you’re thinking a low-profit thought, and you turn things around, you experience exactly what my husband experienced when he stopped drinking beer and eating crab legs doused in butter. The fog lifts. Life is no longer such a struggle. You feel better, and you start getting the results that you want.

Three Low-Profit Thoughts that are Costing You Cash

So now I want to share with you three low-profit thoughts that are costing you cash, and how to turn them around.

Low-Profit Thought #1: I don’t know

The first low-profit thought is I don’t know. This one thought costs us so much cash, we cannot even estimate the amount. It’s immeasurable.

To illustrate why, here’s a real-life example of what “I don’t know” does to you. I’m just back from our girls’ retreat at Montana’s breathtaking Fire Tower Ranch. To get to Fire Tower Ranch, we had to drive from North Idaho, in the Panhandle, the skinny part of Idaho, east into Montana on Interstate 90. We drove on the interstate deep into the Rocky Mountains, passed under a big green sign that says, “Continental Divide” and exited the freeway about 50 miles after that. We headed south away from all signs of civilization, until we ran out of pavement. At that point, we crossed a cattle guard and we kept going, heading deeper and deeper into pristine Montana wilderness. The kind where you see herds of elk. Moose. Grizzly bears.  Everything was going pretty well, until we reached a fork in the road. Left or right? That was the question. And we thought, great. What do we do now? I don’t know.

We were sitting in the dusty car, freaking out a little bit. The “roads” on Fire Tower ranch aren’t “recognized” by Google. So we’re thinking that phones were of no use. My sister in the backseat was looking at the satellite map she’d printed off before we left, but we weren’t oriented—what direction was North? South? It felt like anyone’s guess at that point. After some stressful discussion, we chose left. The wrong way—and eventually we found ourselves with our wheels pointed straight at a steep, muddy hill with ruts so deep that they could swallow the tires on my 4-wheel drive SUV. I could see that if I tried to drive that hill, and one of my tires got stuck in a rut, there was no way out. There was no way we were making it up that mountain in my vehicle.

At that point, we figured, this couldn’t be it. There’s no way. And where we were on the road, there was no convenient place to turn around, so we had to back all the way out. And when we got back to the fork in the road, the place where we’d gone left when we should have gone right, I turned my head just a few degrees to the right and I could see that the Fire Tower ranch was in plain sight.

So what was our problem, when we initially arrived at the fork in the road? That we didn’t know? Or that we thought we didn’t know? it was the latter. When we thought we didn’t know, we sat in the dusty car, freaking out a little bit and arguing a little bit. Not in an intense way, but if you were watching a movie of this road trip, it would have been the part of the movie where the characters do not love each other. They say funny things, but in the moment, they’re angry even if they are saying funny things.

So this little tale illustrates an important thing to know about high-profit thinking. It doesn’t matter if your idea or belief is true. It simply matters that it’s useful. And that was the case with us thinking I don’t know when we were sitting in the car wondering if we should go left or right. The truth is, in the moment we didn’t know if we should go left or right. That was true, but it wasn’t useful. If instead of thinking I don’t know, someone in the car would have instead thought, let’s take a second to figure this out we would have had a different outcome. Because one of three or four different things would have happened.

A) we could call our other sister who was already at the ranch. We could have told her, “we just went down the really steep scary part of the road that you told us about, and now we’re at the fork and we don’t know where to go.” And she could have told us, “I can see your car from here. Go back to the fork and turn right.”

But we didn’t do that because we were assuming that because we were out in the Montana wilderness that the cell phones wouldn’t work. But the truth is we were right underneath a cell phone tower that was installed on Fire Tower Ranch. We had better coverage than I do at my house in Idaho.

The other thing we could have done is consulted the very specific directions that our sister who was already at the ranch emailed to us. They said, “when you reach the bottom of the really scary hill, there’s a fork in the road, turn right.”

The other thing we could’ve done is looked around. We were all sitting in the car staring at the fork in the road and thinking I don’t know which way to go. But if instead of thinking we don’t know which way to go, we would have thought, let’s figure this out, we would have looked around and seeing if we could see something. Literally all we had to do, all I had to do was turn my head to the right from the driver seat in the car, and I could see the fire Tower. By the way, the fire Tower isn’t actually a fire Tower. It’s an amazing three-story house designed to look like a fire Tower and it’s like nothing I have ever seen. Check out the show notes if you want to take a peek at it.

In any case, from the road that we were on the top of the fire tower peeks out through the trees. It was the only visible sign of civilization other than the road that we were on, and it was literally the only thing we needed to see. And if we hadn’t been thinking I don’t know and instead trying to figure it out, the answer would have been immediately apparent.

So here’s what I need you to know. “I don’t know” is never useful, even if it’s true. Usually it isn’t true. I just got off the phone with a client who is a lawyer and we were talking about the “challenges” of working at a big law firm and how much people think they have to work. The low-profit thought is that you can either go part time and make less money or you can kill yourself and make full-time money. This is what most people think, when they’re inside a law firm that’s grinding them into a fine dusty powder with all the billable hours. But the truth is that even inside a firm, those “rules” don’t apply to everyone. For example, the rules of any business never apply to the rainmakers. If you’re in the business of bringing in the business, it immediately becomes apparent that the “rules” aren’t really rules. They pop like soap bubbles in the face of the true power that rainmakers have. Picture blowing bubbles in a rainstorm. They’re not going to last. They just disintegrate. And that’s exactly the way it works for rainmakers in business. If you work in big law, for example, and you want to make big law money but you don’t want to work big law hours, what can you do? One thing you can do is make rain. You can be the lawyer who brings in the business as opposed to being the lawyer who’s doing the hourly work.

So when I was talking to my client about this, I asked her what she thought about that, and she said, “I can totally see that. But I don’t know how to bring in big corporate clients who pay millions of dollars in legal fees.” Those are the kinds of clients that big law firms tend to have.

And I said, “Really?” What do you know about getting hired as outside counsel to a Fortune 500 corporation?

And she proceeded to tell me everything she knew about it. She’s interfaced with in-house counsel–the people who do the hiring. She knows exactly what these folks want. She knows where they don’t get it. She knows how to help them negotiate so they do get it from the big law firms that they hire. On that call, my client and I spent a good 20 minutes of the session with her explaining to me everything she knows about the nice people who are inside the huge corporations that hire the big law firms on the outside.

And so I asked her at the end, “Hmmm. So it seems like you do know something about how to bring in big corporate clients who pay millions of dollars in legal fees. You know exactly what they need. Exactly what they want. And exactly how to make sure they get it.

And she laughed and she said, “Yes. I guess I do know a lot about this.” In fact, she knew everything about this.

99% of the time, when a client says to me, “I don’t know how to do that,” they know exactly how to do it.

Part of being in Gateway to Seven is that you get help tapping into the wisdom of what you do know. When your brain says “I don’t know, “ it literally blocks you from your own wisdom.

That’s 99% of the time. You actually do know the answer and the low-profit thought, “I don’t know” is literally preventing you from seeing the things that you know very well.

What about the rest of the time? The 1% of the time when you don’t know? Then, the thought “I don’t know” is true, but it still isn’t helpful. “I don’t know” is the thing that prevents you, when you’re sitting in the hot dusty car thinking you’re lost and you can’t find the ranch, from turning your head just a few degrees to the right and seeing that the fire tower is literally in your line of sight. It prevents you from seeing, oh yes. I can get there. And it’s actually going to be really easy to do it.

So I don’t know is the first example of a low profit thought that I want to share with you today. Most of the time it’s not true, and never is it useful. High profit thinking it is exactly the opposite. High-profit thinking believes two things. One, you do know. And two, even if you don’t know, it doesn’t matter, because when you engage your brain, you will figure it out.

Notice the circumstance-independence of the alpha energy that comes from thinking, either I know, or I’ll figure it out. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know. Whether you know or not, that’s the circumstance. High Profit thinking is the opinion or belief that it doesn’t matter if you don’t know, because you’re going to figure it out, and you probably already do know.

The other thing to notice from this story is something I told you earlier in the episode. High-profit thinking is often a complete 180 degree turn from what you’re currently thinking. “I don’t know” is the low-profit thought. “I do know,” is the high-profit opposite of that thought. So keep this in mind: When an opinion or belief is leading you away from your money, what do you do? You turn that thing around. You recognize that you were mistaken, just as my husband was with the butter and the beer being harmless, and you drop that low profit thought like the bad habit that it is.

Thinking “I don’t know” is a bad habit that’s costing you cash. “I do know” and “I will figure everything else out” are the good thinking habits that create cash.

Low Profit Thought #2: You can have this, or you can have that. But not both.

So now let’s look at low profit thought number two. The second low profit thought I want to share with you today is that you can have this or that, but you can’t have both.

Here’s another example from our retreat at Fire Tower Ranch. You may recall from prior episodes that my dad was a compulsive gambler and a little bit of a deadbeat. He was a nice guy and a funny guy and many people loved him, but as far as money went, he was a train wreck. So as were driving onto this magnificent ranch in the Montana wilderness, my mother keeps saying things like, “Well, they must be in debt up to their eyeballs.”

One of my sisters is in the back of the car—my sister who wasn’t already at the ranch–and our mom is sitting beside me in the front passenger seat, and we are both telling her, “Mom, I think the owner of this ranch makes a lot of money. I think his business is very lucrative and this is probably not a situation in which people are cash-strapped.”

Not that it matters. We were at the ranch and we were going to have a great weekend retreat and the financial situation of the owner just wasn’t relevant. But what was relevant is the stress that my mother was experiencing as we were driving across the miles of ranch property making our way to the fire tower where we were going to stay for the weekend. She was thinking, there’s no way this kind of wealth could be real. It’s all an illusion. Anytime you see signs of money, you can bet that there’s a big fat stressful debt attached to it that no one is talking about. A monthly payment that you’re not sure you can make and you feel like you’re bleeding cash out of your eyeballs.

With this kind of thinking, that you can own ranches and homes and other things that are external evidence of money, or you can have actual money, but you can’t have both, my mother’s initial experience of the ranch was substantially diminished, because she found that very stressful. She was thinking something in the neighborhood of we are in a phony situation that feels unsafe.

This is a low-profit thought, because it blinds us to the truth. The truth is that there are a handful of people on the planet who have both. Why do they have both? Because they decide to have both.

For example, you can decide to be a lawyer who makes money. you can decide to be a lawyer who works a lot of hours. Or you can have both. You can decide to be the lawyer who makes a lot of money in a few hours. You can do that in any business by the way. And that’s what the owner of the ranch had done for himself.

As we spent the weekend on the ranch, we learned more about the owner. My mom heard stories that indicated why he has the kind of money that he has to own that kind of ranch in Montana. He owns a business. It does something that his clients need and want. He has a team of nine who support the delivery of the happy ending. He spends his time spreading the word about the happy ending that his business creates. It’s not complicated. It’s human nature that if you offer a happy ending, people are going to avail themselves of it. they’re going to buy it from you. Once my mom heard more about the business and what it does, her skepticism turned into something else. An appreciation for the magic that comes from owning a business like that. We were in a magical place. Imagine a three-story house created entirely from stone and wood. There wasn’t a speck of sheetrock or a slap of paint in it. We felt like we’d traveled back in time, in the best way possible. The steps running up the outside of the house were logs cut in half, and you would stand on the flat segment of the half of the log, and these logs that were cut in were secured into two massive timbers with hand-cut chinks to hold the steps in place. The whole thing felt like it had been there for a hundred years, like somebody had carved it with an axe, but it had running water and heat and all the modern amenities, in a part of Montana where you’d never expect to find such a thing. And all of it was created by money that comes from delivering clients to their happy ending.

Hearing and seeing all this created a shift in my mom, from skepticism and stress to appreciation and wonder that this kind of money is possible to ordinary humans. Someone can make this kind of money simply by helping other humans achieve a happy ending. You guys, this is the first step. If you’re not making serious money yet, on some level you’re skeptical. You’re seeing evidence for why it won’t work. For why serious wealth isn’t possible for you. What it’s fanciful thinking. High-profit thinking requires you to do the opposite—to start looking for evidence for why it is possible. For how simple it is to create magical amounts of money by delivering humans to a happy ending.

It’s really the only guarantee that life offers to you—humans want a happy ending. If you help them get it, they will pay you. Every time. All day long. The antidote to the low profit thought you can have this or you can have that, but you can’t have both is when you deliver a happy ending, you can have everything. Because commerce is an exchange of consideration. If you’re giving humans everything they want, you will get everything you want. That’s just the way commerce works.

Low Profit Thought #3: We’re not going to get there

The third low profit thought I’d like to share with you today is we’re not going to get there. On the drive out to the ranch, my mom was feeling a bit of stress. A few moments of freaking out about, “Where are we? Is this the right road? Can it really be this far?” On the way home, we were making the identical drive, just in reverse. And the drive felt EASY.

Why was this the case? It was the same road. The same car. The same people traveling. The only difference was her thinking. On the way to the ranch, her thinking was, I’m not sure this is going to work. I’m not sure we’re going to get there. On the way home, the thinking was different. It was along the lines of, we know what we’re doing now. We know where we’re going. We’re definitely going to get there.

The emotional state from two different kinds of thinking was palpable in the car. On the way to the ranch, stress was running high. On the way home, enjoyment took its place.

What I’d like you to see about this is that stress drains your energy. It’s an indulgent emotion because it doesn’t use energy to serve your audience, to deliver the happy ending to your clients. All it does is put a run on your resources. That is not useful and it never leads to magical amounts of money.

High-profit thinking means making the conscious choice not to let your brain run your emotional state off the road. No matter what’s happening, how you feel isn’t dependent on your circumstances.

So notice a couple of things about this. Even on our way to the ranch, my mom and I were in exactly the same situation—a dusty car on a dirt road on a remote ranch in Montana.

She was feeling worried and antsy. I was feeling fine. Why? Because of our ideas and opinions about our situation. She was worried we were lost. Worried we weren’t going to make it. Worried we would be late. I was thinking that our situation was not a cause for worry. My thought was, we will either get there or we won’t. Either way, we’ll be fine, but of course we are going to get there. It’s not the moon. It’s a fire tower that is somewhere on this property. There’s no way we won’t get there.  

See how that works? Your ideas and opinions, not your situation, determines your emotional state. And they also drive your outcome. As between the two emotional states—antsy and worried, or purposeful and calm—which is more likely to enable a human to find the ranch? To get to the destination? I’ll let you decide what to think about that, but in the meantime, I’ll reiterate. I’m the one who found the ranch. I’m the one who turned her head, looked around, and thought, oh. There it is.  So the emotional state of calm, purposeful certainty is what got us where we wanted to go. That’s what I’d like you to take from this story.

The third high profit thought I can offer you today is to have the belief that you are definitely going to get there. Have the certainty that you are going to arrive at your happy ending.

Does that feel like a tall order? If so, book a consult with me, because one of two things is happening. You’re either on the right road, but you are wanting to doubt yourself because of low-profit thinking. Or you’re not on the right road, and you know it, but you don’t know what to do about it. Either way, we’ll sort it out where you are on the call with me.

So now let’s recap. High-profit thinking is the skill of developing and cultivating and holding opinions and beliefs that get you where you’re going. It doesn’t matter if they’re true. If they’re verifiable. If they’re objectively correct. All that matters is if they are good fuel for your mission. Low-profit thinking, on the other hand, is the act of developing, cultivating and holding opinions and beliefs that don’t get you where you’re going. They keep you stuck. They send you careening off the road. They slam your car in reverse and send you back to the minor leagues.

Low profit thinking also makes the ride stressful. Decidedly un-fun. High-profit thinking makes the ride more enjoyable. It doesn’t just get you where you’re going. It takes the entire trip and it turns it from a miserable slog into a joyride.

So here’s what to do now. If you need some help getting where you’re going, and having fun along the way, get in touch. In my signature coaching program Gateway to Seven, you will acquire the skill of high-profit thinking, AND the other six skills that you need to take your business to seven figures and beyond. Schedule the call at kellyhollingsworth.com. Oh, and one thing you might want to know. The folks who’ve already scheduled calls were excited to have the high-level business conversation that takes place in these calls, and they were excited about the idea of working with me. And then when they heard the price and the terms of being in Gateway to Seven and acquiring all the skills, they said, “Really? That’s amazing. I thought it was going to cost so much more.” When they hear the price, they go from excited to delighted.

So do yourself a favor and book a call if you want some deep insight into what’s holding you back in your business, so you can see if Gateway to Seven is right for you. The call is free, but infinitely valuable. And don’t delay, because the time to make more money is now. Always now, my friends. Thanks for being here today. I’ll talk to you next time.