Todd Herman is a high performance coach who has spent 20 years helping people achieve the levels of success we all dream about. From Olympic athletes to executives to online business owners, he knows how to get results.
BestSelf founder Allen Brouwer had the chance to sit down with Todd for an hour to discuss the lessons in Todd’s program that can make you more productive, harness your alter ego and help you be your best self.
This is the kind of knowledge that Todd normally reserves for his training programs, personal coaching and live events, which are so world class that they won a Stevie Award in 2016.
But as a BestSelf reader, you’re getting it all for free in this exclusive interview. Be sure to watch the full interview below to hear all that Todd has to say. We share our six main takeaways below.
1. Break the Year Into Chunks
Todd began his career coaching athletes on how to develop mental toughness in order to reach a high level of competitive performance. He’s since found a way to translate the lessons he learned coaching athletes into powerful training for business people who want to achieve business growth they never thought possible.
This program is called The 90 Day Year, and it’s based on breaking your year into manageable 90-day chunks. During each of these chunks you focus on a strategically chosen business goal that will help your company reach the next level. Instead of mapping out your year as a whole, you divide it into more manageable portions that allow you to increase your focus and stay on top of emerging opportunities.
2. Boost Your Personal Performance with an Alter Ego
In his work as an athletic and business coach, Todd has found that one of the most effective ways for people to reach new levels of performance is to literally pretend to be someone else. But not just anyone else — the person that you associate with the goals you want to achieve.
You visualize yourself as that person, even using a costume to help you get into the mindset. Todd found that he associated wearing glasses with success, so he picked up a pair of inexpensive glasses and put them on to help him get into the business mindset. This may sound silly, but Todd swears that it works, since the physical change of your appearance helps you break out of existing habits and mindsets that are holding you back.
3. Change Your Environment to Change Your Habits
Just as changing your appearance is a powerful tool for shifting your mindset, changing your environment can be a powerful tool for changing your habits. In the interview, Allen discusses how he used a home office to help him mark the transition from being at home to being at work.
Even though his office was still in his house, he made sure to mentally separate it by only using it to do work — no recreation or distractions. This is an example of using environment change as a catalyst to habit change. Rather than attempting to increase self-discipline or some other personal quality in order to resist distractions, Allen eliminated the distraction completely through some tweaks to his working environment. You can do the same with any habit you’re attempting to change.
4. Focus on the Things You Can Control
Todd reminds us that so much of the traditional business and corporate structure pushes us to focus on things that are out of our control. This could be things like how your marketing plan goes, whether or not customers like your product, or your exact revenue numbers. You can influence these outcomes to some degree, but at the end of the day they’re not fully in your control, especially if you’re working with many other team members.
What Todd suggests instead is to focus on the things you can control. In goal-setting terms, this means creating more input-based goals and fewer output-based ones.
For instance, you can’t control how many products your customers buy, but you can control the types of marketing experiments you try or the number of conversations you have with existing customers to figure out how you can improve your offerings. These are the right things to focus on, as they not only will help you achieve greater business success, but they will also leave you feeling more satisfied and confident.
Need help setting achievable goals? Check out our Weekly Action Planner.
5. Start with a Small Vision
When you’re starting a business, it’s easy to look at the people you admire and think, “Wow, they’ve done so much, I could never achieve anything on that scale.” But as Todd points out, what you don’t see when you look at your heroes is all the work they put in up front to get where they are.
Todd didn’t start out with a complete, step-by-step plan of the business success he’d have today. All he knew was that he had a message worth sharing, and he took small steps to share it. Find the first small goal that you can work towards as part of your business vision, and focus on that.
In the process, you may end up in a completely different place than you imagined. But whatever that place is, it’ll be way beyond where you’d be if you let the success of others intimidate you.
6. No One Achieves Success Alone
Throughout the interview, Todd mentions how fortunate he’s been to have amazing mentors — people who showed him what was possible and taught him more than he ever could have learned through trial and error. In the very beginning of his career, he had this fantasy of being able to build a thriving business all on his own.
As he set off on his business journey, however, Todd realized that no one ever achieves success without the support of mentors, friends, family and team members. So embrace asking for help, find mentors and always remain humble. He reminds us that the greatest contributions to the world happen through collaborations. Even visionary leader Elon Musk relies on a massive team to make his big goals a reality.
Boost Your Performance with The 90 Day Year Today
We hope you find these key insights from Todd’s interview to be helpful in your entrepreneurial and self-improvement journey. To learn more, we encourage you to watch the full interview, which we’ve linked above. If you want more content from Todd, then we suggest checking out his video series at 90DayYear.com (registration for The 90 Day Year is limited and only opens during certain times of the year).
In the meantime, you can check out our Self Mastery Academy, which will show you everything you need to know to reclaim your time, conquer procrastination and stop spinning your wheels.
