13: How You Do Anything is How You Do Everything – Overcoming the Patterns That Hold Your Business Back

What Is This Episode About…

In this episode, we are going to discuss the idea that how we do anything is how we do everything and dive into the fact that our personal patterns, especially around money, affect our businesses more than we know.

Whatever it is that you want to achieve, be it personal or business, if you believe in it wholeheartedly, then you must be willing to invest everything you have into it. We hope this episode helps you identify the patterns that are holding you back, so you can achieve the success you desire.

Key Points Discussed:

• The root of yoga is to help shift perception (01:37)
• Being an entrepreneur means taking the risk of putting yourself out there (03:19)
• Your personal finance patterns will follow you into your business (07:01)
• You have to look at your key performance indicators (10:12)
• The patterns that influence how we operate personally and professionally (16:19)

Learn More About The Content Discussed…

Join The Facebook Group –> http://bit.ly/yogaentrepreneur

When Was It Released…

This episode was released September 18, 2019

Episode Transcript…

Disclaimer: The Transcript Is Auto-Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors

00:00          Alright. Welcome. And, today’s episode, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” We talk.. What does that mean, John. We talked last time about the patterns that we have, specifically around money, and what we want to talk about today is, as an entrepreneur, how do those personal patterns affect our business?

00:23          What’s up everyone? You are listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. I am Chris Yax, and I’m John Yax. We are part of a small group of yoga entrepreneurs who are committed to making a living, doing what we love, without feeling guilty about making money, or ashamed of being successful, because we know the real value of yoga and how the world needs it now more than ever. This podcast is here to teach the strategies and tactics so we can thrive financially as yoga entrepreneurs. We are the Yax brothers and welcome to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets.

00:54          Alright. So, last time we got to talk about Chris’s personal financial issues. I still have a vulnerability hangover happening from that one. I feel so good about it. And before that, I got to talk about my financial issues. And, Chris and I were talking about it and we were like, “So what…? So, how does this affect other entrepreneurs?” Because one of the biggest things that we all struggle with as entrepreneurs and as people in general are… are money issues. Right? Money is an energy, it’s a tool. It’s… you know, we have different ideas around how to make it, how to hold onto it, how to build it, and then what it means to us personally. And so the idea is, “How we do anything is how we do everything.”

01:37          How would do anything is how we do everything. So this is really interesting because, in the yoga world, like you take, like the roots of yoga, and what it’s really designed to do. It’s to help shift perception. Right? How you viewed world, first and foremost, how you view yourself. And so, it’s literally like, the oldest personal development system ever created. But what’s so interesting… so we’ve been in it and we’ve been, obviously, since been practicing since 2002, three teachings since 2004, owning businesses in 2005, so we’ve been in it for a while, and it was about 2015 when we really started, like we saw the future, and we realized what was going to happen within our business, and what needed to happen was we needed to like level up our understanding of marketing, of advertising, and business, and finances, all that stuff. So these last four years have been crazy big deep dive.

02:26          Well, we’ve hired coaches, we’ve join mastermind programs, we’ve like done all the things that we knew needed to happen to be able to level up our games, so that we can like effectively run our business. And what’s so fascinating is we were going into these programs thinking, “Oh wait, we’re going to learn like how to market. We’re gonna learn about messaging, we’re gonna learn about offer creation, we’re gonna learn how to like the KPIs of your business”, which we’ll talk about a little bit. And, invariably what they would start with was, we have to talk about how you feel about yourself. I was like, “Wait a second, they’re talking about yoga.” What it highlighted for us is that, entrepreneurship is the best personal development called the system… personal development path that we can take. And the reason is, is that, it’s entrepreneurship or yoga. And so, when you’re a yoga entrepreneur, you are doubling down on your personal development.

03:19          You go super fast. When you decide to be an entrepreneur, it means you are taking the risk of putting yourself out there. Right? In more ways than one. Not just your passion and saying, “Okay. This is what I love and this is how I’m going.. what I’m going to present to the world, and this, is what I want to make a living doing.” But it also… it’s all on our shoulders. Right? So if you’re working for somebody else, you can be passionate about the work, and do it completely, but it’s up to the other person to take care of all of it. You’re still gonna get a paycheck, whether you decide about whether… whether you decide to come in or not. Right? You’d take a sick day, you take a couple of days off, you take a vacation, you do. You don’t have to look at the details of the business, and you still get a paycheck.

04:05          As an entrepreneur, you then put it all on your shoulders. Is it, there’s a funny saying, it’s like I’m giving up my 40 hour work week for an 80 hour work week as an entrepreneur because I’m a control freak. Right? Because we love the control of it because it’s rests on our shoulders. Now it’s the most powerful personal development system because it’s up to us whether we succeed or fail. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting cause like part of it, let’s be, I want to back up just a little bit and like what we’re saying is that you believe so wholeheartedly and what you’re doing, whatever it is that business is for us, it’s yoga. We believe so wholeheartedly in it that we are willing to invest everything we have. Like in the beginning, in 2005 we invested everything we had for this thing. To run. Like if we failed, we lost it all.

04:55          And that level of commitment requires you to put yourself out there in a way that exposes you, literally exposes you, like to believe in something so wholeheartedly that you’re willing to say, hey everyone, here’s my message. Yoga, like from martial artists who and like, and I want you to pay for these services. In fact, I am going to open up a yoga studio, a hot yoga studio for us, and I’d love you to come in and let me talk to you about what Yoga is and let me help you heal the pain that you have. Like your, there’s an emotional exposure that happens when you’re willing first to go all in on your dreams, right? Because it is like such a heavy commitment to know that I can no longer blame anybody else for my success or my failure, but me, period. And that, so that’s growth inspiring because man, talk about like all the pressure on your shoulders and you’re going to pull up big boy pants, John, or you’re not right.

06:00          Put my boots on, but my boots on. And so the next level is, okay, so I’ve made that commitment. I’ve put all that pressure on myself because I believe in it so wholeheartedly. But then it’s the willingness to share that message and the moment you open yourself up to that, all of a sudden you’re exposing yourself to haters, to people who want to throw shade at people who aren’t in the arena, who haven’t committed to that, but who have very strong opinions in the social world. We live in about what your message means to them or not. And so by virtue of you having to then express yourself in a way that most likely isn’t in the mainstream, isn’t in the norm, especially back in 2005 when we started this, it was not like you weren’t seeing it on pharmaceutical advertisements. You weren’t seeing on, on every like grocery store advertisement and people doing yoga and it was like how it represents health now, like, and so the willingness, especially with men teaching it. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt the willingness to go there, right. It just, you can’t help but grow in the process by virtue of what it means

07:01          to be able to, to have, to, to be successful in your business as an entrepreneur. Yeah. And then the other piece of this, which is vitally important when you can get over all of that, what Chris has said is bringing your financial money issues into your business because it’s going to go there, right? You’re all of a sudden you start to create a following, you start to get traction. You’re cheap. You’re able to pay the bills every month, and that at some point you’re able to give yourself a little salary and start to build that, right? Your patterns, your own personal financial patterns or your own budgeting patterns, your own even ideas and feelings about money are gonna follow you right into your business. And so what’s required of us is to take a real look at that and say, are these, is my feelings around money? Is My, are my patterns actually serving me? Are They gonna help me? Not just personally, but in my business and be able to organize my finances in my business to continue to keep the doors open or is it that little parasite that’s all the sudden going to eat its host, right. That’s going to take over and all of a sudden I have to close the doors because I haven’t managed my money because I’m bringing myself to it. How we do anything is how we do everything.

08:10          Yeah. So back in 2016 it was actually the end of 2016 is that right? No, it was the end of 2016 the very beginning. So January one, 2017, the structure of our partnership completely changed how we bought out one partner. Uh, we separated from the other one all amicable. It was all like it was, it was, it was right for everyone. You know, the partnership, the way I think of it was like, it was like a shoe that just didn’t fit anymore. So we had to replace the shoe and put on a different one. And for everyone, it’s all worked out well. So, but what happened prior to that? This is what I was saying, like, man, we knew we had to level up our game. Now financially, what that meant was we were on the hook to learn and to know all of it.

08:54          So back in 2005, one of the things that we knew we didn’t know was I didn’t understand, like I even went to, I went to business school, but I knew I wasn’t qualified to run the finances of our business. You know, you may have felt differently, but what we decided collectively to do was to bring on a partner who understood that, right? And who was in that world and who could manage that. Fast forward to 2015 we realized, man, that’s not our reality anymore. Like that person. Like we’re buying that person out. Like we’re, we’re moving on, on her own. And so there was a period of time after that where we stayed with the same bookkeeper and we were looking. So, and she, you know, she’s old school, you know, and I think she liked the big green accounting book that was like no longer in existence.

09:40          Like it’s all automated now. But, uh, God bless, I love her. I’m not talking, I’m not talking smack about her at all, but she was just, there’s, here it is. She was stuck in her ways. Her pattern was an old school way of doing it where the system that we used was not cloud-based. There you needed eight passwords to be able to hack into it. No two people could be in it at the same time. And so what that meant for us as we’re like trying to venture in and run our own business and look at the numbers was that we were literally operating for the future

10:12          while looking behind months in the past months, it’d be like driving a car forward, looking in the rear view mirror to steer what, yeah. That’s great. So this brings up another key point of, and this is a huge transition for us. W W uh, studying with our mentors and our coaches. Chris and I dove deep and got a lot of help and we just consumed information, which was also, you know, it’s, it’s interesting there’s was a vulnerability there, right? We had already become successful in our business. And yeah, we got to a point where we were like, we don’t know this information. Like we need to study with people that have good strategies, good frameworks to help us. And one of the big things that one of our teachers talked about was KPIs, key performance indicators. And so if you are an entrepreneur, you’re a business owner. If you do, you have to look at your key performance indicators.

11:01          Key performance indicators are like if you were highlight in a plane and if you’re flying a plane and you were doing it during the day, it’s kind of easy to fly during the day. I don’t know about flying if it is or not. I don’t, I don’t fly. So, but I mean you, you literally can use your eyes. That’s my point, right? You can see if a mountains coming from behind, you can see if you’re too close to the ground. Right? You can see around now that same pilot has to fly at night. That same pilot has to fly during a rainstorm in the clouds. Right. How do they fly? They fly off their numbers at night, they fly off their numbers, their measurements, their reading, their measurements are reading their numbers, they understand how far away they are, how far off the ground they are. They understand all of it based off their numbers. Your business is the exact same thing, right? When everything’s beautiful and the sun is out, when you can see clearly in money’s coming in and you’re doing well,

11:54          you’re like, oh, I don’t need to look at my numbers. Everything’s cool. But when it gets dark,

11:59          when the, when the storm comes, if you’re not looking at your numbers, you crash.

12:04          And this is the, this was what our blah, this is a huge, this was

12:08          the biggest Aha moments for Chris and I were like, all right, we got to get down and uh, serious about looking at our KPIs. So we started just regularly looking at these, these key numbers in our business weekly and then these key numbers monthly and then being so consistent with it that we could start to pick up the patterns. And that was one of the keys when we started seeing these patterns. We can make little tweaks in our business to, to shift the pattern if it wasn’t where we wanted it to be and that it was the game changer for me.

12:40          Yeah, so some examples of the, like some KPIs like for sr sales, total sales numbers, numbers of memberships, the number of new people coming in, the percentage of those people that have bought an intro package, the percentage of the intro package, people that have purchased another package, those conversion rates are huge. It’s literally the oxygen that fuels the lungs of our business, right? It’s the lifeblood of it. And understanding that on a weekly and biweekly basis gives us a very clear understanding of how much oxygen do we have in our system right now. Do we need more meaning we can make decisions in the now,

13:18          bye

13:19          if by looking at numbers in the very like the most recent past so that we don’t have to go months and months and months and wonder what happened, how do we end up where we are? Right? And so what’s so interesting about this is that this is no different than like your own personal life. Like we end up, I know in my relationship I, we talk about it in the teacher trainings we do. I’m like, I’m very binary with this. Like in my relationship with my wife, if there’s any tension between us, I look at that as the beginning of the end. We have an awesome relationship, so like if I love her to death, I guarantee I will be with her for the rest of my life. Period. You can mark this podcast episode as I just threw the gauntlet down. That’s what’s going to happen and I believe it wholeheartedly and I know it’s true.

14:06          It’s because I know in real-time when something’s amiss between us, I have to resolve it. Why not? What you’re seeing is trends, right, Chris? Yeah, because looking at the trends. Yeah, there’s a great book. It was essentialism. I think it was essentially some or the one thing. Either one of those books are awesome. You should read both of them, but it was as actually was essential as, I mean they’re talking about trying to find the leads in your life. Journalism at its heart is trying to find the lead, what the lead isn’t like. It’s not the story that’s presented. It’s what does the story mean? It’s not all the details, it’s what’s embedded in those details as far as the meaning of what’s happening now and what does that mean for the future. And what I mean by that is like the KPIs are those details.

14:50          There are leads there that are going to give you the information that you need to make changes to keep the business running on of like a very sound financial footing for my relationship. The leads are the experiences, the feelings that I have between my wife and I. And this is all relationships and I’m just using this as an example that are giving me the trends in our relationship that will influence the way we feel about each other tomorrow and the next day and the next day. So I, I mean it sincerely, like when I’m, when there’s tension, I have to resolve it as soon as possible because I know the potential of what that’s gonna mean. The lead in that story is there is some dysfunction on our horizon. There is some tension on a horizon and if you know it in your own relationships like you know it’s not one big thing.

15:38          It’s a lot of little things that just fill the gaps and create space and friction and tension between two people. It’s no different in business there’s a lot, there’s little decisions that are made and little like spaces that fill up in between where you want to be and where you are that if you’re not looking at them regularly it’s you look back just as I would my relationship and be like, how did we end up here? Are for looking at my business like how do we end up here? Or your personal finances. You end up going on a shopping spree every Saturday. That’s what you do and all of a sudden you’re spending more than you’re bringing in, but maybe just not my whole lot and then three or four months down the road you look back and you’re like, how did I end up in debt?

16:19          How did I end up here? It’s the same thing for your business. The same thing for your relationships. It is the same thing. We have to stop, take stock of where we are, look at our KPIs, your key performance indicators in our personal finances, in our relationships, in your business, in order to change what’s not working and then shifted into a way that is working so that you can be successful with it in any realm. Right? We have to see our numbers. Yep. So here’s the takeaway. There is a pattern that you have in your life. Just like I have patterns in my life and John has patterns in his life that are influencing the way we operate personally and professionally. [inaudible] looking at those as just facts, not as like the story of me and what that like and all the things that it means because of that, but just pure facts.

17:12          Oh, when this happens, I do this and when that happens I do that. Understanding that is like, it’s literally hacking in to your own experiences so that they don’t sabotage. Like the beauty in the effort and all the hard work and the sacrifice that you’ve put in to like being an entrepreneur and doing the work of like putting it all out there and like, like taking a stand for what you believe in and what you love because how you do anything is how you do everything. When we focus on those things and we get clear about the facts of the life, of facts of our lives, where these are just the patterns I can then that’s the first step and understanding, oh, will or will not

17:50          allow that to bleed into this other area. Yeah, and then it’s understanding the lifeblood, the numbers, the KPIs because the numbers aren’t emotional. Like Krista said, the numbers are just the facts, but they’re a map. They show you where you’ve been and they’re a great projection of where you’re going to go. So that’s all I got. That’s it. Thank you so much

18:11          for joining us for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and we will see you on the next one. Thanks so much. Have a face. Yes, thanks so much for listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. Do you have a question that you’d like us to answer raw and uncut on the podcast? If you want your questions answered, all you need to do is head over to Apple Podcasts, and do three simple things. One; rate and review telling us what you think of the podcast. Two; in that review, ask anything you want related to yoga, and three; if you want to shout out, leave your Instagram handle or name and that’s it. Then listen in to hear your question answered Live, raw and uncut. Join us next time on Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets Podcast. Thanks