All right, welcome back to The Daily Mastermind. I'm your host, George Wright III. Today, we're going to explore a truth that every entrepreneur eventually collides with, and that is that your business will never outgrow your identity. You can upgrade your software, you can upgrade, you can hire more staff, you can double your ad spend, but if you don't grow yourself, neither will your business and we talked a little bit about this yesterday but the idea is that you've got to grow yourself to grow your business now life doesn't give you what you want it gives you what you are we know that and I told you yesterday I love that quote from Carl Jung where he says until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate so if identity drives behavior and behavior drives results then the most leveraged growth move isn't a new tactic. It's upgrading your identity. And today we're going to lock into that. We're going to use a little bit of a practical framework you can use in your business to really start growing. So let's kind of get into it. Most of my career, I'm just going to give you a little bit of background of some awareness that I've come up with. You know, most of my career, I've been able to build a lot of successful things, but I've also been the kind of person who learns skills, picks up tactics. I've always got, you know, new upgrades I'm making when it comes to, you know, techniques I use in the business. And every time I learn a new technique, the business grows. You know, the bottom line is things that I've done have worked and a lot of failures as well. But the challenge with that is that at some point, the strategies and tactics, just like marketing campaigns, you know, they always stall out there. And so you're always looking for the next tactic. You're always looking for the next campaign to keep things going. And one of the lessons that I learned early on, and even though I'm still learning this every day, is that when I stop trying to build external systems or solutions and start working to grow my own identity, my own internal world, my own internal game, that's when things really go to the next level. And that's one of the reasons why I started the Daily Mastermind. It's the reason I'm such a big advocate of personal development. It's even the reason I have this Phoenix emblem that you see on the apparel that I have. It's the idea that you can unleash your potential, grow to your next level, and really build your mind, body, money, and business to create the life that you're meant to live. But every breakthrough that I've ever had has come right after an internal shift, an evolution of the way I think, hence my company named Evolution Group. But whenever I stop identifying is the operator who has to touch every task and I start embodying the CEO who builds leaders instead of doing it myself, that's when my team changes, our numbers change, and most importantly, my peace of mind changes. And so identity is what really rewrites your limits. And so listen to me really carefully when I say identity drives your beliefs. So identity drives your beliefs and your beliefs are going to drive your behavior, right? And your behavior builds habits and habits determine your outcome. It's a universal law. Your identity is what's going to drive your beliefs and your behavior, what you choose as your identity. And if you see yourself as this, you know solopreneur can get it all done yourself you instinctively going to protect your own control of things You going to resist delegation and you going to choose short hustle over long scalability And so if you see yourself as more of a calm decisive builder you'll architect systems, empower your people, protect your focus. Are you protecting your focus or are you maintaining control? So you got to ask yourself, which identity do your actions prove? I want to say that again. I want you to really listen to this. Which identity do your actions prove that you're following? Not your intentions, not what you think you want to do, but your calendar. Your actual schedule is your identity expressed in time. So if your week is packed with low leverage tasks only you can do, your identity is still an operator. You know, if your week highlights deep work, leadership, strategic conversations, then you are inhabiting the identity of a CEO, one that's growing your business, not doing it all by yourself. And, you know, reoccurring problems that you might have and things that you keep bumping up against. This is my red flag. When I have things that keep coming up, communication problems, you know, results not getting done, KPIs not getting hit. It's identity feedback. I want you to think of it that way. When reoccurring problems happen, it's an identity feedback. Cash crunches often mirror a leader avoiding pricing power or value communication. You know, teams with chaos often mirror a leader who hasn't clarified the standards and common vision. Marketing, for example, marketing and consistency often mirrors a leader who hasn't fully owned their message. I talk about authority a lot recently. If you're not acting like an authority, it's probably mirroring some things you got to work on. So let's talk about the three biggest identity traps that keep entrepreneurs stuck. And these are lessons that I kind of try to remind myself of and I go back to. So think about this as three different traps that entrepreneurs fall into. The first is the operator trap. You equate your business with value and control with safety. And so when you want, you know, control, you're valuing safety, is a better way to put it. You're indispensable, you know, in the worst way. If you step away, the machine stops. You're proud of the grind. You, you, you know, your, your grind is what you have as your badge of honor. This is an operator trap. You're valuing control. You, you know, you get things done yourself. If you're gone, nothing happens. You know, you're proud of your grind, right? So that's the operator trap. The second trap is the imposter trap. You know, you've achieved, but you don't own it. You dismiss your wins and you're not really celebrating them. And you compare your behind the scenes to others' highlight reels. You try to compare yourself to others' wins. And, you know, you overwork to compensate for an identity that hasn't caught up with your accomplishments. You can't receive what you don't believe you deserve, right? You don't deserve it. This is that imposter trap, if you can relate to that one. So you might be falling into an operator trap. You might be falling into an imposter trap. Or the last one is the survival trap. You run on cortisol and adrenaline Pressure is your fuel It worked when you started but it silently takes away all your creativity your relationships and your decision quality You react to everything and you choose urgency over importance You live in those quadrants I talk about when we do our Franklin Planner podcast where everything urgent and everything not important. And in survival, you can't actually truly grow your business. You're only putting out fires all the time. So all of these traps, the operator trap, the imposter trap, and the survival trap, they're all related to your identity. These are the traps that you fall into where you know you've got to upgrade your identity. So I talked about this yesterday and we talked about three different steps to grow your inner game. So I'm just going to remind you of them. Step one is awareness. You've got to name that identity that is stopping you. What is it? What are you operating from that's stopping you? And listen to your language. If you say things like, I'm terrible at hiring or I always mess up launches or, you know, nobody, maybe you don't think it's negative, but nobody else can do it as good as I can. Those are identity statements masquerading the fact that you need to grow your identity. So audit your calendar. You've got to become aware, you know, what would a CEO do that you're not doing? A true next level CEO. So become aware. And then that second step was that alignment or the vision of who you are. Define the next level identity that you want to be. Be specific. Maybe write a one-pager, you know, a leader operating profile, an identity that you would do. How do you think? What do you tolerate? What decisions and rules do you make? What are your principles? What are your standards for meetings, metrics, and communication? Be specific. Give your future identity a voice so that you can hear it when you start to drift away from it. If you haven't clarified what your vision is of who you want to grow into, how do you have a litmus test for what you're doing right now? And then, you know, in addition to the awareness and the alignment, you've got to have action. You've got to actually live it. You've got to embody it. Identity upgrades come through action, not affirmations. This is not like give your affirmations, it's going to happen. You know, choose evidence, behaviors, things that are next level ways to track it. For example, I delegate one repeating task every week with a clear SOP. I protect two 90-minute blocks for deep work off the phone every single week because a true next-level CEO would do that. You know, I coach leaders on my team. Instead of solving their problems, I just coach them. Small behaviors create neurological proofs. So your brain, you know, you've got to help your team, for example, grow just as much as you grow. Now let's talk just really quick about a couple ways that you can, you know, maybe get something tangible or tactical that you can use. Sometimes it's as simple as putting a two-column page on a sheet, page on a sheet, list on a page or a sheet of paper, the left column being the current identity behaviors that you recognize you're doing, and the right column being the next level identity behaviors. Make a goal to just move those behaviors over to the right column. You know, next level identity behaviors. Move one per week and go from doing it the way you currently do it to the doing it the way you know you need to be doing it for your next level identity. Another thing you can do is, listen, this is a big one. You've got to upgrade your language. You've got to start replacing words like I have to with I choose to or I can with I don yet Language is really what going to steer a lot of of your identity subconsciously and it pointing you either in the right or the wrong direction So upgrade your language And the last thing is make sure you surround yourself with the right people. See, most of us surround ourselves with people that are at par or below. What you need to do is you need to upgrade your environment. Surround yourself with positive, successful people that are growing, people that are further along than you. Because when you do that, you get this belief transference. People that are already doing it have more confidence. You know what it's like when you're around people that have more confidence. Now, I want to give you a couple of cautions to think about today. One is, many of us feel like if things are going to be done right, we got to do ourselves. And if you reframe that a little bit and you step back, you could say, you realize that Without leaders, your business is never going to scale. So it doesn't matter if you can do it right or better. You've got to take time to train leaders because the future you, the one that's running a sizable organization that has a lot of success, doesn't want to be doing it themselves. And the other thing I guess I'd caution you about is that most of us don't take time to look at or work on or grow our identity. we like personal development but we don't use time to grow our identity so you got to think things like you know you're already doing identity work by the way you know subconscious is growing whether you like it or not you're doing you're you're validating your identity and what you want to do is be purposeful you want to take time and reframe it so that you know that my future depends on me taking time to really identify and grow my identity and you know and so if you do that i know it'll make a difference. Your business is going to mirror your identity. And if you want enduring external expansion, whether it's your business, your relationships, your wealth, you've got to work on the inner game. You've got to say to yourself, you know, if my current schedule and calendar is proof of where I want to be, what do I want it to look like when, or if your calendar is proof of what your current identity is, what do you want it to look like when you become the person you want to become. So, you know, I really encourage you to dig deep on the topic of identity. We'll talk more and more about it over the coming weeks and months going into the, you know, the first of the year, but, you know, your business cannot outgrow your identity. And so it's important that you spend time clearly defining where you're at and starting to use that as a litmus test against everything you do on a day-to-day basis. That's my message for today. I hope you have a great week. I hope things are going off well for you. But if they're not, hit me up. Let me know what you're struggling with. What can we do to help you? And if you're winning, which I know most of you are, let's celebrate the wins. You know, hit me up on the Daily Mastermind. You know, I put out, I always put it in the show notes, but my email address is george at g3worldwide.com. I always read all my emails. It might take me a little bit of time, but I'd love to respond to you. Hit me up. Let me know what you're doing. And once again, I'm going to keep hammering down. if you're not building your authority go to theauthorityscorecard.com it'll give you a quick assessment show you a bunch of ways you can you can grow your identity in and your and your authority at the same time and listen it doesn't matter if you're starting your brand you're building your brand or you're an iconic brand there's always things that we can do to help take you to the next level so have an amazing day i look forward to talking with you tomorrow once again this is george wright and this has been the daily mastermind talk to you tomorrow .
