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Eric's Podcast
Welcome to Eric's Podcast – a journey through faith, life, and the lessons that shape us. Join Eric as he shares personal stories, reflections, shares insights that inspire hope and encourages. Whether you're navigating life's challenges or seeking motivation this podcast offers a blend of authenticity, inspiration, and thought-provoking conversations.
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Eric's Podcast
S2 #6: Keith Ellis on Making the Impossible Easy Through Superpower Coaching and Community Support
What if unlocking your full potential was as simple as making a wish? Join us as we welcome Keith Ellis, an accomplished entrepreneur and business coach, who reveals the secrets behind his book, "How to Make the Impossible Easy." Keith’s rich experiences—from building companies to being part of a team acquired by giants like LinkedIn and Microsoft—have culminated in the innovative "Superpower Coaching" program. Together, we dissect the barriers that hold entrepreneurs back and discover how the Magic Lamp Framework can transform daunting goals into exciting adventures.
Keith sheds light on the influence of community in achieving impossible dreams, drawing on personal insights about family and the importance of a nurturing environment. Our conversation navigates the power of impossibility thinking, where the focus shifts to collaboration and leveraging social networks for exponential growth. Listen as Keith shares his journey of becoming a parent and grandparent, illustrating how surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals can propel you toward success in both personal and professional spheres.
Finally, we explore how embracing the impossible can lead to exponential growth, supported by advanced tools like the DailyAI app. Keith emphasizes the necessity of a mindset shift and the role of added capabilities in making the impossible possible. Before wrapping up, we invite you to dive deeper into Keith’s work through his newly released book and offer a glimpse into further resources on his website. Don't miss this opportunity to reframe your limits and set ambitious goals that could change the trajectory of your life.
Eric's Podcast.
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to another episode of the Eric's Podcast. I am your host, eric. Joining me today in the studio is Keith Ellis. He is a successful entrepreneur, a powerful author and a business coach. He's working on his new book 10X Superpower, which will be coming out at the end of this year, and we're going to dive right in and talk about it. And thank you and welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks, eric, delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, tell me a little bit about yourself. What have you been up to lately?
Speaker 2:Well, I've been. Actually, I just finished this book that I've been working on. I finished it a couple weeks ago. It's called how to Make the Impossible Easy and the subtitle is the Astonishing Secret of the 10X Superpower, which is what you were referring to earlier. So that's been keeping me very busy. And then setting up a coaching program around the book. Actually, the book is about what's in the coaching program. So keeping busy doing those things, tell me a little bit about your entrepreneur kind of background. The book is about what's in the coaching program.
Speaker 1:So keeping busy doing those things, uh, tell me a little bit about your entrepreneur kind of uh background and how you got how you, how did you get into it? Did you just, um, naturally from the get go I've always been an entrepreneur or did you have you worked in more of a uh, the business world for a little bit, uh, before moving and doing your own thing? And what did that transition look like? Well, so, I uh?
Speaker 2:I guess the answer to the question is uh. For most of my life I've worked for small companies. Uh, it started out I was an employee for a small company, for an entrepreneur, uh, and then, uh, I became a part owner of various companies and helped launch companies. Um, so my entrepreneurial journey goes, goes way back to the beginning. I worked my way through college selling high, I got into computers working for an entrepreneur and eventually into a software company where I was part owner, and then another company and that kind of thing. So it's been an entrepreneurial journey. Now it took a weird turn.
Speaker 2:A few years back I joined a company that was in the e-learning space E-learning was a big growth area that was in the e-learning space. E-learning was a big growth area, and this was a terrific company named lyndacom, and I was brought on board to create a new team. They weren't a startup. They had a lot of success for a number of years, but they wanted to create a new team and they brought me on board to do that. So I did that and we were successful, and then in a couple of years, we were bought by LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:So I'd always been in an entrepreneurial world. That's where I wanted to be Wanted nothing to do with a big company. But then they made me an offer that I couldn't refuse. So I stayed there for a couple of years and then LinkedIn was bought by Microsoft. Again, didn't want anything, nothing wrong with Microsoft, I just didn't want anything to do wrong with Microsoft. I just didn't want to anything to do with being inside the you know belly of the beast.
Speaker 2:If they made me an offer that I couldn't refuse, so I stayed for another couple of years and finally said you know, this is great, it's been wonderful, it's certainly been financially rewarding. But I need to hang out my own shingle and and and coach people on what I've learned in my entrepreneurial journey and also working for some of the largest companies in the world. Uh, not by choice, as it was, but as it were, but but uh, it just turned out that way and I learned a lot from being within those huge, uh, behemoth companies too. So I put it all together into the, into the coaching that I'm doing now, which I call superpower coaching.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's go into that a little bit. Um, as far as, uh, you know the type of coaching and stuff that you do, what a lot of our audience are they're they're they're entrepreneurs or they're trying to work on our project, or might they might be on the fence trying to figure out whether or not they even want to go and do something, because it might look too hard. What would you say for that person? That's like either just getting started or thinking about getting started.
Speaker 2:Uh, how would you?
Speaker 1:approach that.
Speaker 2:All right. So so my thing is this is something I discovered, uh, through the years, through a lot of trial and error, and also from having some great mentors um, you know great mentors virtual mentors, real mentors that taught me various things and what I realized after writing a couple of books about goal setting and about personal development. I realized that all along, I had been successful at making incremental progress. I would want to improve things by 20% or 30% and I'd be very successful doing that. And if you do that long enough, you know you, you, you have some real sustained success. But I also realized that I was selling myself short. Uh, I was. I don't know about how you were brought up, but I was brought up. You know not to not to expect too much so that you don't get disappointed. Not to you know not to not to expect too much so that you don't get disappointed. Not to you know not to shoot too high so that you don't fail that kind of thing, and that's really the exact opposite of the way. Uh, we should be working with our minds, because our minds are incredibly powerful computers. There's, there's, there's. You know, every magazine article today has something in it about AI, right, artificial intelligence and how to program artificial intelligence to do your bidding. It's called prompt engineering, right, and what I focused on was prompt engineering for human intelligence, for the intelligence between your ears, which is still the most powerful computer on the planet.
Speaker 2:So when I finally got to this point where I was putting all this stuff together, I realized the secret to phenomenal success is to commit to an impossible goal. I mean that literally. I mean to figure out something you want so much that you're willing to commit to it even though you think it's impossible. And when you do that, your brain starts doing things, really good, things that you never were able to experience before. Because what typically happens and you mentioned it in the example or the question you asked about an entrepreneur who's trying to figure out whether I should do this right, whether I should start this, do this, and if you think it's impossible, you probably aren't going to try. Right, if you think it's too high a mountain climb, you're not going to try it. So your brain doesn't try to figure it out. But if you say I really want this, you know I've got this idea or this product, or I want freedom, right, I don't want to work for somebody else the rest of my life. You've got something you want so much that you're willing to commit to it, even though you think it's impossible. Suddenly your brain shifts gear and says, oh okay, so he's not. He's not saying no anymore, he's saying let's make this happen. I guess I better join the, join the game, right. And now your brain is enlisted and helping you accomplish what you want to accomplish. And the weird thing about it is we've been doing this our whole lives. We just don't give ourselves credit for it. This our whole lives. We just don't give ourselves credit for it.
Speaker 2:If you think about when you were 11 months old, you can't remember that far back. But you're crawling around the carpet. What do you want to do? You want to walk. Right, you'll do anything to walk. You're emotionally incapable of it. You're physically incapable of it. You're psychologically incapable of it. It's impossible for you to walk, but you keep trying and eventually you're psychologically incapable of it. It's impossible for you to walk, but you keep trying and eventually you walk. And then eventually you've accomplished the impossible and you get so good at it, it becomes easy and you start running and, as any parent knows, life changes when your kids start running around, so you accomplish something that was impossible, but you did it anyway. And then you did it again with reading and writing, and learning how to talk, and, a little bit later in your life, learning how to ride a bicycle and learning how to drive a car. These were all things that at one point in your life were impossible and another point became possible and even easy. And this pattern we have this, all of us have this pattern in our lives. But what happens is we get to a stage where all that stuff that I just described is kind of automatic. Right, we're programmed by instinct just to kind of do this stuff. And then we stop growing as you know, physical being, we stop getting taller Okay, that's what I mean by stopping growing and then this instinct is no longer automatic, but it's still there. Now to the impossible, even though it was impossible, and then make it happen, that instinct, that same process exists and the secret sauce. It all comes down to this, this, this is what makes it all work.
Speaker 2:If you say something is impossible, you don't mean. I'm not talking about impossible in the sense of the laws of physics, right, you can't go faster than the speed of light, or you can't be at two places at the same time, although quantum mechanics is telling us that's not even true anymore. But forget that. I'm not talking about that stuff. I'm talking about what we think is impossible between our ears. And if you define something as impossible, what you mean is I can't do it, I'm not capable of it. That's all you're saying.
Speaker 2:Impossible is not a fact, it's an opinion. So that's what you're doing. Your opinion is I can't do it, I'm incapable of it. So what I do with my clients is, when they tell me this, I just look them right in the eye and say okay, what if you added capabilities? And they go you mean, what if I became more capable? Exactly, what capabilities do you need to accomplish the impossible? See, that's a different question than most people have ever asked themselves, because they don't even think about the impossible. They don't let themselves think about it. But if you commit to it and ask a different question okay, what capabilities do I need to accomplish the impossible? Suddenly your brain goes oh, you need this, you need this, you need this. Here's how you get this. And now you're on your way. It's like magic. It's amazing. Anybody can do it. Very, very few people actually do after they stop this period of automatic growth, when that instinct goes dormant, they don't go back to it why, do you think?
Speaker 2:why do you?
Speaker 1:think that we stop thinking in that way, because you're absolutely right when, when you're a kid, you don't really think that. I mean, there might be some things that you think, oh yeah, I can't do that, and you tell yourself that, and then you believe it without even trying uh, which is what my three-year-old is doing now and um, but, but yeah, what do you do? You think it is a pattern of telling ourselves that we cannot do it. Therefore, we shouldn't try to do it, or do you think that it's just, it's a culture thing? What do you think?
Speaker 2:um, I think it's a little bit of both, so. So let's take your example. Your three-year-old's a little bit young for this example, but it's a son, it's your three-year-old son. So your son is a little young for this, but he's going to get there really quickly. Imagine the example I like to use. I think this has probably happened to me. Imagine you're in second grade and all your classmates you're asked by your teacher to draw a cow. So you draw when everybody draws a cow and what you draw kind of looks like an ashtray. Right, I mean, it's you got zero, creativity zero.
Speaker 1:Definitely look like an ashtray but that's what I mean.
Speaker 2:You have no talent whatsoever. So you no talent whatsoever. So you tell yourself that. Right, so you tell yourself that. And then the next time you're asked to do something quote, unquote, creative you tell yourself the same thing again I'm not that creative, I don't do that, that's not my thing.
Speaker 2:And then, by the time you grow up and you're conscious of what's going on in your life, you've already programmed yourself to believe you can't do this or that or the other and I'm just using drawing as an example. It could be anything. It could be climbing the monkey bars, it could be kicking a soccer ball or hitting a baseball, it could be any number of things that you didn't do well at when you were young and you just said, oh, I can't do that. And then you began to believe it. And what happens is our bodies and our minds keep growing and we often outgrow our beliefs, but we never go back and check. And what happens is you end up with these beliefs that are limiting you. You don't even know you have them.
Speaker 2:I get into a meeting with clients frequently and a successful entrepreneur who wants to take his life to the next level says you know, yeah, I've done this and this and this, but I have no imagination. And I always look him right in the eye and say do you realize? That's an active imagination, imagination, and it's like you don't think you have these things going on in your life, and yet you do. You have to revisit your beliefs, your limiting beliefs, and that's what committing to the impossible does, Because you're essentially saying you're doing an end run around your limiting beliefs. You're essentially saying you're doing an end run around your limiting beliefs.
Speaker 2:I never try to convince somebody that when they commit to something that's impossible, I never try to convince them that it's possible. I never try to convince them they should do it. I just let them figure it out If they want it enough and commit to it. Then suddenly they start trying to figure out how to make it happen. And that's where the magic happens. But they, you know they have to want it. They have to do the heavy lifting you mentioned that you.
Speaker 1:Let's go backwards a little bit. You mentioned that you wrote a book on setting goals. I did look, I was looking at it and the reviews are really good and they mention a unique take on goal setting. Can you go into a little bit of that Because I'm very curious on what that take is?
Speaker 2:Sure, so I was, for whatever reason. I've thought about this a lot, I'm not sure I have a good answer for this, but for whatever reason, I became a success junkie at a very early age and I started reading everything I could read and going to seminars and listening to what were then on cassette tapes. In those days, you know, before podcasts and then CDs and then podcasts, and I'm still that way, but I've it's a big but I hated to set goals, even though I knew I should. I'd studied them, I knew how powerful they are and how important they are. I didn't do it because it was like it squeezed all the spontaneity out out of life, you know.
Speaker 2:I'm committed to this, that's all. Yeah, exactly, I'm committed to this, that's all I'm going to, all I'm going to do the rest of the year. And you know, it just got boring. And then I was in the shower one day this is years ago, I think we'd just taken the family to see Aladdin or something that gives you an idea of how far back that goes, right. And I was in the shower thinking, you know, it would be so cool if goal setting was like rubbing a magic lamp and a genie pops out. Right, how cool would that be. And it was like I was hit by lightning because I realized wait a minute, it is, it's exactly the same thing. But we don't realize that. And I jumped out of the shower. I think I almost slipped in a bar of soap.
Speaker 2:I always keep a pad of paper and a pen somewhere where I can reach it, whatever I'm doing, so I can start jotting down notes. So there I am in the bathroom, dripping wet, writing out this. What became what's called the magic lamp framework and what it was is. And so the book, the goal setting book, is called the magic lamp. The subtitle is goal setting.
Speaker 2:For people who hate setting goals, that was me. I was just writing this book for me and what it was is think of the difference between your alarm goes off, you roll over and you think, okay, I got to get up and work on my goals. Okay, that's one thing. Compare it to this. Your alarm goes off, you roll over and think one thing. Compare it to this your alarm goes off, you roll over and think today I'm going to make my wishes come true. And the energy and excitement was no comparison. It just completely energized goals to me because it transformed them into wishes. And that's really what the take is that you're talking about when you think about making your wishes come true. It's just so exciting, it's so fun, it's so magical.
Speaker 2:And when I first started teaching this and I wrote this book and it became very successful and it sold all around the world and helped tens of thousands of people in a bunch of different languages. But when I first started teaching it, somebody asked me, said yeah, but the really cool thing about a genie is the genie does all the work Right. That's why we're fascinated with Aladdin and the magic lamp. And I thought about that and I said, yeah, but if the genie does all the work, then you get the results, but you don't get any of the growth. Get the results, but you don't get any of the growth. And what I mean by that is, let's say, you decide. Let's take your question that launched us on this vector. You're somebody who's trying to figure out do I want to become an entrepreneur, do I want to open a business to do X, or do I want to do this project? Well, to achieve this thing, you have to become someone for whom that is possible.
Speaker 2:That's the real payoff, the results if you say, okay, I want to increase my sales by 30%, that's great. It's great to have 30% more sales, 30% more income, whatever. But the real benefit to you is growing into the person who can do that, and that's what makes impossible goals so powerful. If you commit to an impossible goal, when you achieve it, the benefit to you isn't the result, it's a byproduct. It's a wonderful byproduct. Maybe it's money, fame, fortune, health, relationships.
Speaker 2:You can set a goal, an impossible goal, in any part of your life, but the benefit to you is that you had to become someone for whom the goal was possible. Or, to go back to what we said earlier, you had to add capabilities to yourself until you could make this impossible thing possible and then easy. And that's the real benefit. So the magic lamp really was an early framework for saying exactly this that the benefit to you. You don't want a genie, you want to be your own genie. That's where the power comes from. Not only can you give your, you can grant yourself any wish you're truly committed to, but you then grow into the person for whom that wish is possible, and that's the real benefit. That's something a genie can't give you. What, what?
Speaker 1:do you do when you find yourself getting burnt out? You're, you're, you're, you're, you're trying to get there. You know you set your impossible goal and it's like you're all riled up at the very beginning and now you're three years into it and you're kind of just doing the same old, same old thing. You know, one step after another, and it's kind of you don't know. You still believe in, like the goal, but you know that you can achieve it eventually if you keep going at it. But you don't know necessarily if I want to keep going this way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's a that's a very large question, uh, and I'm going to try to try to carve it down into something more manageable here. And it's a great question because it happens to all of us. The short answer is if you're feeling that way, take some time off. And most of us don't think that way. We think we got to work harder. Well, the burnout is essentially saying I'm working so hard, I'm losing productivity, I'm less productive doing what I'm doing than I could be if I was doing less of it.
Speaker 2:Truth, and when I say I help people achieve impossible goals, there's another piece of that that we haven't talked about, but we're about to. I help people achieve impossible goals, but only if they're willing to work less than they do now, because the way to do the impossible I mean this makes some sense. When you think about it. It'll sound a little weird at first. If, if you want to do something that's impossible, it's beyond your capabilities, then what you've done to this point in your life to get you where you are cannot get you there, by definition. Right? Um, you're incapable of doing that. That's your belief. Therefore, doing more of what you're doing now is not going to accomplish the impossible.
Speaker 2:You have to do something different, and one of the things and this is true for everybody, and one of the key things you have to do differently is you have to work less. You have to force yourself to figure out what are your most important tasks and focus on those and, even better, to really make this work, you learn to focus yourself on what I call joy strengths. Joy strengths are things that you love to do so much. You probably do them for free, but you love to do them so much you're really good at them and you're so good at them you love doing them right. It's like a circle. So we all have these things in our life and if you ask the typical entrepreneur how much of your day do you spend doing things like that joy, and they'll think about it off to a list and they'll realize maybe they're doing five percent or ten percent or twenty percent of their day is doing something that they love, probably the reason they started the business in the first place, right?
Speaker 2:and then the rest of it is, you know, um, taxes and employee reviews and paperwork and meetings and all this crap that they sort of got roped into instead of being the entrepreneurial visionary that they were when they started their business. But that's what gets them off. That's what they enjoy. So what I coach people to do is you need to step back from all the busy work. We know about the 80-20 rule, right, we've all heard that. We know that 80% of what we do is probably a waste of time. 20% is giving us most of our benefit.
Speaker 2:But the question that never gets answered when we take courses or go to seminars about 80-20, is how do you tell the difference? How do you know in advance what's an 80% and what's a 20%? And the answer is commit to an impossible goal. Because the impossible goal says if you commit to an impossible goal, you realize first, what I've done to get to this point in my life can't get me there. What I've done to get to this point in my life can't get me there. So I got to set all that stuff aside. And guess what all that stuff is? It's the 80%. You just automatically just move all this crap off your desk and now you're focused on. Okay, there's certain few things, maybe one or two things that can help me get this goal and I need to focus on those. And now that's the 20%. So, almost instantly, your brain clears the decks, gets rid of all the distraction, all the confusion the 80% and says this is what you need to focus on.
Speaker 2:And if you're doing what you described earlier, you know um sort of plotting through one year after another after another, working toward a goal. You may well get there at some point, but why wait? Why not get there sooner? Why not accelerate the process and accomplish even more than your original goal by making it a bigger goal, a more ambitious goal an impossible goal is the definition I use and then commit to that and then watch your brain suddenly clear the decks and suddenly you're focused on doing really, really cool stuff, stuff you enjoy. How do you work with a partner? What do you mean in a relationship like?
Speaker 1:a marriage. It could be a marriage, it could be a business partner. A relationship like a marriage. It could be. It could be a marriage, it could be a business partner. Um, how do you, how do you work on your possible goal when with also while working with another person?
Speaker 2:well, that's a that becomes a, um, that becomes as complicated a question as a relationship is complicated, right, and the short answer to that is how do I say this? This will be intimidating to some people who are watching this Remember what got you where you are is not going to get you where you want to go, right, if you're committing to the impossible. One of I? I actually don't know this gentleman, but I've read his books and, uh, done his seminars and things. His name is Dan Sullivan. He's an absolutely brilliant entrepreneurial coach and he has a saying. I don't think he even came up with a saying, but he, uh, he's first person I heard it from. He says what got you out of Egypt is not going to get you to the promised land.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I love that, because he's making this point of what got you here can't get you there, okay. And once you start figuring that out, you realize that includes everything, including relationships. I don't mean you get rid of all your relationships and start anew. I'm not suggesting that. What I'm suggesting is that your relationships need to reflect this commitment to your goal. Right, the people you're working with need to be supportive of it and to get on board. Or if they're not, and you're okay with that, then you need to essentially commit to this impossible goal without their support. Right, without them being okay. That doesn't mean you're taking them out of your life. It means you're focused doing what you're doing, but you become super clear on what you want and what you have to do to do it. And, realistically, what happens is case in point.
Speaker 2:We tend to surround ourselves with people who share our level of existence. We've had similar experiences. We have similar levels of success, similar incomes. If you decide you want to increase your income, for example, this is a real easy thing to measure, right, by 10 times thousand percent. That sounds impossible, right, but that's good. You want it to sound impossible and if you really want it, if you really commit to it, then you begin to realize that I need to include in my group people who are at that level. Right, I need to associate with people who think this way, or, if they aren't at that level, they at least are going in the same direction, that they're committed to achieving their impossible, whatever that is.
Speaker 2:I have a superpower coaching program, and one of the benefits of it Is that there's a community of people who actually get this right, this right. So, even if you're not getting the support, if you will in your family and friends, because you know this is a new thing for them, just just as it's a new thing for you, um, you can be with people who are in us, in the same place, who understand the same language, who who are committed to an impossible goal and who can help you um, well, can help you in general in any number of ways, but can help you keep your mind focused on it in a very positive way. So that's essentially changing your social environment to reflect where you want to be, not where you are.
Speaker 1:If that makes sense, that makes sense not where you are, if that makes sense, that makes sense. Um, I don't know if you're comfortable with it, but, uh, your new book. If you wanted to read, like, um, some kind of excerpt or something from your new book, uh, that would be. That's fine, we can go into that. We could talk a little bit about, uh, family, how, what is your? How has your experience been with parenting and family and marriage, in reference to all the stuff that you've learned over the years?
Speaker 2:uh, again a huge question. Um, I'm one of those lucky people I I found the right partner, the right woman at the right time and somehow convinced her into marrying me, not certain how that happened.
Speaker 2:And she had three little girls and they are now three grown women who are absolutely amazing people, and I knew I got married very young and I knew absolutely nothing about parenting, but again, I was this success junkie. So, um, there's a uh, one of the people that I worked with over the years, a guy named Tony linguistics NLP, and one of the key things in that world is a really simple principle Success leaves clues, right.
Speaker 2:So, my wife was the best parent I'd ever seen. She was absolutely amazing. The relationship she had with her daughters was incredible. So I essentially modeled that, right? I didn't have a clue, certainly I didn't have a clue about girls in general. I didn't have a clue about being daughters, this. But I actually became, I guess, a reasonably effective parent because I was modeling someone who had achieved what I hoped to achieve, all part of this success junkie thing. I just happened to be modeling my wife and doing it, and it's a similar thing, just completely clueless about being grandparents.
Speaker 2:It's a different deal than being a parent. It's wonderful, it's awesome, but it's different because it's not your kid anymore, right? So the input you have to be clinical about it is very different than the input you have as a parent. You're doing it one step removed and you have your child who is dealing with their child, and you have to figure out how to keep a respectful distance so that they can raise their child the way they want to, right, because that's how you raise them. Does that make sense, right? Yeah, Anyway, but it's. But again, I just I approach this like I approach everything else in life. I read books, I watch seminars and go to meetings about people who are good at relating to kids and parenting and try to grow from that, try to model what seems to be successful to me and it's, and it's worked. At least it's worked from my point of view. Again, you can ask my granddaughter. She can, she can tell you.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, let's let's. If you're open to reading that excerpt, that let's dive right in.
Speaker 2:Well, so rather than reading which would probably put me to sleep Let me kind of talk about it, okay. Okay, sure, you mentioned the excerpt. If people go to my website my website is KeithElliscom there's a movie they can watch and the movie is sort of a deeper dive into what you and I have been talking about, about what I call impossibility. Thinking about committing to the impossible and suddenly opening up a whole new level to your life. You didn't even know was there, you didn't even realize you could think about it, but you now give yourself permission to think about it. I think of it as legalizing the impossible. So there's a little short movie there and then, if you watch the movie, you will get a free excerpt from my book.
Speaker 2:So my book is how to Make the Impossible Easy. It's broken into 10 breakthroughs. It's a pretty short book, but it's broken into 10 breakthroughs. Any one of those breakthroughs can transform your life at the speed of thought. It's remarkable. But you put all 10 of them together and you have what I call the 10X super power, which is how you accomplish the impossible. 10x super power, which is how you accomplish the impossible.
Speaker 2:So the excerpt I make available are the first three breakthroughs, and they are. I won't say they're the meat of the book, but they're what really explains what impossibility thinking is how to make the impossible easy, and then the rest are sort of the pieces you need to put in place to actually make that happen. But those first three breakthroughs are great, and the first one. So again, instead of reading it, I'll just go through it. The first one is what we've been talking about. It's the idea that you cannot know what's possible for your life unless you embrace the impossible. Now that's a big thought because it sort of turns a lot of conventional wisdom on its head. It doesn't really make any sense to embrace the impossible because it's impossible, except that you have no idea what's possible for you until you embrace the impossible. And the reason I say it this way is I don't know how to convince somebody that something they think is impossible is actually possible. I don't know how to do that. I mean, they're convinced it's impossible, right?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So I don't even bother to try, I do it in front and I say okay, I totally agree with you. If you think something is impossible for you, you're totally right, you're absolutely right. Now what I want you to do is figure out something that you want so much that you're willing to commit to it, even though you think it's impossible. So again, I'm not saying it's possible, I'm saying commit to it and watch what happens. And when somebody sort of figures out what I'm saying here, that I'm literally serious about impossible, and if they come up with a big goal and I'll ask him it's in a coaching session I'll ask him do you think you can do that? And if they say, yeah, I think I can probably do it, Guess what? You're not being ambitious enough. You need. You need to think it's impossible, because that's how you clear the deck of all the crap you're dealing with all the distractions, everything that is slowing you down, because when you commit to the impossible, by definition, what got you here can't get you there. So that's the first breakthrough, this idea of legalizing the impossible in your own mind and embracing it. It's a cool thing to do.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite questions is it's actually four words added on to just about any question, and the four words are if anything were possible. So if I asked you, what do you want to do with your business? You go well, I like to gain. You know I like to gain. Uh, grow 20%, 30% the next year, and you know, 30% of the year. And that's great, that's wonderful, wonderful goals. If anything were possible, what would you want for your business? And now you go oh well, if anything were possible, I want to grow it by a thousand percent. Bingo, you just dealt with and I'm not talking about you, obviously, eric, I'm just generic. You.
Speaker 2:You just uncovered a limiting belief. Right, you're setting a goal of 20 or 30% because you don't think anything more is possible. Right, but you add those four words, if anything were possible. And suddenly you go, oh well, I really want is 1,000% growth or whatever, plug in a number. And now you realize something has been holding you back. You've been unwilling to even to consider that because you thought it was impossible. But once you consider it and once you decide I want that, I mean I really want that, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get there, your brain goes oh, it's not impossible anymore. We better figure out how to make it work. We'd better figure out how to add capabilities.
Speaker 2:So your brain starts doing that and you start climbing that mountain and you get to a point where you realize you know this actually is possible. And then you get to a point where you say I'm actually doing this. And then you get to a point where you say this is easy. Why did I think it was so hard before? Just like when you learned how to walk or talk or, you know, drive a car or any of that other stuff. You got to a point where what was intimidating became easy. What was impossible became easy.
Speaker 2:So that's the first breakthrough Impossibility thinking. Embrace the impossible. The second is sort of the and it's like a magician and he pulls the cover off his trick. Right, and because in the back of our mind is we think okay, I'm committed to the impossible, I really want this, and the first thing we start thinking is how do I make it happen? Right, right, and that's the wrong question. That's a question we've been asking our whole lives. It works great. It solves all kinds of problems. How do I do this, how do I do that? But in this case, if you're going, if you're committed to the impossible, you need to think differently, and the question that you really should be asking is who can help me do this Now?
Speaker 2:this is where you get into the secret sauce of achieving the impossible. If you think something is impossible for you, grow your business by a thousand percent in three years. Let's just throw that out there. Right, that's an impossible goal for most entrepreneurs. But if you commit to that, you say you want that and you ask yourself who can help me get there? Who can help me do that?
Speaker 2:You've asked a very different question and if you look at it, remember impossible to you means you are incapable of it, right? Well, what if you could add the capabilities of somebody who has capabilities you don't have? So if you figure out the capabilities you need marketing or sales or product development or just general business, whatever it is you need what if you added the capabilities of that person? Now your capabilities have been expanded by that much, and it's actually more than, because what happens is you put two people together, it becomes greater than the sum of the parts. It's just the way human synergy works. So you think of adding the capabilities of somebody else, but it doesn't have to stop with adding the capabilities of one person. You can add the capabilities of five people, or 50, or 500, or 5,000. And you realize that when I talk about impossible. I'm being literal, and there is no limit to this, because there's no limit to who can help you. There's no limit to how many people can help you. There are 8 billion people on the planet. I guarantee you you can find somebody who has exactly the capability you need and you can learn how to collaborate with that person, using their capabilities and yours, and create something bigger than what you had when you started. And you can keep doing that. You can keep adding people and adding people and I'm not talking about delegation here. Adding people and adding people, and I'm not talking about delegation here. Delegation is usually done very poorly in most organizations, especially big organizations, but this is true in any organization. Delegation usually means I've got something on my desk. I don't want to do it, I hate it, so I'm going to give it to you, eric. Yeah, there you go, and your reaction is here's some more crap coming downhill at me. Right, that's just it. I work for somebody else. I got to do what they tell me to do, so I give up something I hate and now you hate it. What I'm talking about is you focus on We'll get back to this thing I talked about earlier Joy strengths, your joy strength, the thing that you love so much.
Speaker 2:Your joy strength, the thing that you love so much that you want to do it. You want to do it all day long. You do it for free and you love it so much. You're good at it and you're so good at it, you love it so much. That's a joy strength. So you focus your time on what you're really good at, which, by the way, is the best way you can contribute to your own organization. That's the biggest contribution you can make to your customers, to your colleagues, to your family, to your world doing what you love to do so much that you're good at it and you're so good at it you love to do it. So you focus on your joy strengths. Then you recruit somebody who has the capabilities you need, and that is their joy strengths. Then you recruit somebody who has the capabilities you need, and that is their joy strengths, right?
Speaker 2:So maybe you hate to do bookkeeping, right? I guarantee you there are people who love bookkeeping. They just can't wait to get up in the morning and do bookkeeping. If you're not a bookkeeper, don't ask me to explain it, but anything you want to transfer to somebody else, there is somebody who absolutely loves that, and you need to find that person and bring that person into your, your collaboration. So there's no limit to this. There's thinking um, and a little thing that's changing there sometimes. So it's all about finding the right. Who right? Who can help me? Who's the right? Who sometimes the right? Who is an it? It's a new technology. It's something that can do.
Speaker 2:I'll give you an example. I have a newsletter. I think it's an incredible newsletter. The title of the newsletter is If Anything Were Possible, and it's about people who do things that are impossible and they make them easy and they make them easy. So it's about growing as a person, learning new skills. It's focused on entrepreneurship and business, obviously, but the lessons can apply anywhere. I don't compile that newsletter.
Speaker 2:I was going to. I was going to hire a team to do it, but the team kept growing. I needed somebody to go out and search the internet. I needed somebody to edit. I needed somebody to go out and search the internet. I needed somebody to edit. I need somebody to put it all together and format it. I needed somebody to send it out to the people I want it sent out to, and then I found an AI tool that does all that. It does it all for a tiny fraction of what I would have paid a team to do it and it does it better than they would have done it because it does its sleep. And it does it better than they would have done it because it does its sleep. Yeah, it covers so much territory in terms of its searches and it does it all automatically behind the scenes, formats, it spits it out. It's such a good product that I can't wait to see it each week, which is really what I was hoping.
Speaker 2:I didn't want just another newsletter. Everybody's got a newsletter. I wanted something that would just get me juiced every time it would come into my inbox. Yeah, uh, and that's, and that's what it is. So that's a tool that helped me do that. That's not a who, that's an it, but it has that same feeling of who can help me or, in this case, what can help me accomplish this impossible goal. So embrace the impossible, uh, think, or find the ideal who's.
Speaker 2:That's the second breakthrough. And the third breakthrough is, um, this whole idea of joy strengths. We touched on on it, but it's really. It's really the core of how somebody can move forward in life and optimize their contribution to their, to their world, to their business, to their family, to their world. And that's to spend time doing what you love to do so much You're good at it. You're so good at it, you love to do it A joy strength, and each of us has these things.
Speaker 2:But we've often put ourselves in positions where we're not spending much of the day doing it. So one example for me is I love this kind of interaction, I love having a conversation with somebody. I just get off on it, it's fun, I always learn stuff. It's just, it's like it gets me up in the morning to do this kind of thing, right. So that's one of the reasons I do podcast interviews, because it's just a ball. I feel the same way when I'm coaching right, one-on-one coaching. It's just, it's just a wonderful, energizing person and I'm an introvert a wonderful, energizing person Um and I'm an introvert, it right.
Speaker 2:That's what's weird about this. But when I got this set up in a certain way I did the energy just flows. So that's a joy strength for me. Um, each of us has things that we bring to the table that are just inherent in who we are and and we are often we. We are forced, or we choose, to leave that stuff behind because we have to earn a living. We trade our time for a certain amount of money and in return, we do what we're told to do, and it rarely has anything to do with our joy strengths.
Speaker 2:And the beauty of being an entrepreneur is you call the shots, you decide what you do, and if you want to reach the impossible, if you want to take your life to a level that is, let's say, 10 times beyond where it is now, or your business to a level 10 times beyond that, then you have to do some things differently, and one of them is to find the right people, for whom doing the work you want them to do is their joy strength, and that frees you up to focus on your joy strength. So you spend your day doing things you enjoy. What a radical concept, right? You mentioned burnout earlier. Right, guess what? Right, guess what. If you're doing something you love to do and you just get off on it, burnout is non-existent, it's not. It's not an issue. It's like you're on vacation every day because you're make to your own business, to your own customers, because this is this unique gift you have that you're passionate about and you're involved in emotionally and psychologically, and you organize your day so that you're doing most of your day is doing those things. I mean not your whole day. You know you got to mow the lawn, you got to do the dishes. You know life is life, right, but I'm talking about at work. Sure, find somebody to give stuff to so that your desk is free and clear and you can focus on what you love to do and they can focus on what you love to do and they can focus on what they love to do and you can grow that organization as big as you care to. And every time you add a new capability, you get farther up that ladder toward the impossible and pretty soon you'll achieve the impossible and the real benefit.
Speaker 2:Going back to the beginning of what we were talking about, the real benefit is not that you achieve this goal. That's great, wonderful byproduct. Wonderful to have. But the real benefit is that you have grown into someone for whom this is now possible. You know how to add capabilities. You have a whole bunch of new connections in your life. You've surrounded yourself with a social setting that reinforces this belief and commitment to the impossible. So you've made all these major changes in your life.
Speaker 2:And guess what? Once you've achieved this impossible goal, you can go for the next goal, the next impossible goal, and your launching pad isn't the old you, it's the new you, it's the person who's grown to this level, so that when you set your next impossible goal and achieve that, you're now growing exponentially. You're not just growing in a linear fashion where you do a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. You're actually in an exponential fashion.
Speaker 2:When I talk about the subtitle of my book, the Astonishing Secret of the 10X Superpower, the 10X is an exponent, the X is an exponent. 10x has been around for years and to most people it means 10 times more right, which is great. But I've taken that to the next level and I've taken that X and I've turned it into an exponent, so that what we're talking about here is exponential growth in your life. You make one impossible goal. You become the person who can make that goal possible. You do the next goal. You become the person and you just keep going and going and there's no end to it. It's really cool, I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, it sounds great. Definitely learned a lot um today in this episode and, uh, definitely going to try it out and start finding some of that stuff to my own projects my own, you know, way of think, of thought. So, keith, uh, what's the future look like for you? Um, going forward, what is it? What's the future look like for you? And you mentioned one of your. You mentioned a really good app for newsletters. Is there any other? Is there books or any other uh apps or anything else that you use frequently that are really helpful and useful to you?
Speaker 2:oh, I got a list of them, but the the app I was talking about there is called dailyai uh so.
Speaker 2:So that's an app, and there there are lots of other ones because I'm using ai. Ai fascinates me because of this prompt engineering right. I focus, I teach and I coach people how to do prompt engineering for their human intelligence, Because if you really want to get the most out of AI, you need to learn how to get the most out of your own intelligence. That's what makes AI work for you. No-transcript for me. Uh, who's?
Speaker 1:the right.
Speaker 2:who's to get things done? They're also actual human being. Who's that helped me get things done? Uh, they do what they love and it increases my capabilities to do that.
Speaker 1:What is the main point that the listener should take away from this episode?
Speaker 2:All right, so I'm going to be repetitive here. Repetition is good, sometimes right, but this is really the key thought to what I coach in my superpower coaching program and what is in the book, and it's this If you, you will never understand what is possible for you until you embrace the impossible. That's the thought. If I died. After this conversation is over, if somebody could take anything with them from me, that's what I would like them to take.
Speaker 1:Perfect. And then where can people find you connect with you? You mentioned your website.
Speaker 2:KeithElliscom, k-e-i-t-h-e-l-l-i-scom, and there's that little. When is your new book coming out's out, it's out. It came out last month okay, well, I'm guessing they can go find it on Amazon they can find it on Amazon and there's in the excerpt that they can get for free. There's also a link to it. So yeah, exactly perfect.
Speaker 1:Well, keith, we'll have to have you back on the show sometime to get a refresher and but yeah, this was a great episode. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Eric. This is delightful. Thank you.
