My-weekly-share-the-journey-video 5 March 2024

Here is my latest Share the Journey Video.  There is also a a full transcript below if you prefer to read,

My-weekly-share-the-journey-video

Hi there, Steve here and a very warm welcome to my home in Gambia, still Sorry, no beach again, Sorry. We will get there. I think I underestimated the amount of involvement I would have to have in the pre-liquidation phase of my limited company here in the UK.

It seems to be taking up a load of time really. Hopefully next week it will all be done and dusted and I can crack on with this online venture. So these weekly videos are changing the focus a little bit.

I  need to become a little more focused on you guys, yeah, the customer, hopefully customer, people, my audience if you like, yeah. I have always been, in my businesses I have always been customer focused. People do buy from people, so yeah, I am a customer focused person.

I try to keep my customers satisfied, just like Simon and Garfunkel, really. So I know I will never keep, it is impossible to keep, to please everybody all of the time, but if I please most people most of the time, I am happy with that. This is what I strive to do anyway.

So with that in mind, if anybody has got any issues, or any information they would like me to go through on affiliate marketing, or online marketing in general, please feel free and let me know. You can leave me a message, if you are watching on YouTube you can leave me a message, if you are watching the video on my blog, you can obviously put a comment after the blog, and I will read all of them, I do read all of them, and I act on all of them, if I have the knowledge to do it. If I don’t have the knowledge to do it yet, I will tell you, I am not going to make things up.

I have been on a journey of discovery for two years now, so I have learnt quite a lot of stuff in that time. (But I don’t know everything) So what I hope now to share with you on these videos, weekly videos, will be what I have learnt, which I believe is of major benefit to you. So tune in every week and see if there is anything that I have learnt the previous week that will benefit you.

I am attending weekly meetings with two mentors and their coaching team as well. So I am picking up information from mentorships that actually cost me an investment of several thousand pounds really, so it is well worth leveraging that here for free if you like.

This week has been a bit of a strange week for me, I don’t know what it is, well I think I know what it is actually.

I have felt very very strange, very very strange all of last week, I am really just pulling out of it over the weekend. Last week I was sitting down and trying to do some work at the computer, work on my business, which is usually not a problem to me, I love working on my business, but last week I just got no focus, it wasn’t there, just totally unfocused, very difficult to get any motivation going, no particular reason for it. Was it burnout, was it this, was it this, I don’t know.

I certainly wasn’t depressed, I don’t suffer depression, well I don’t think I do anyway. I find a cycle that is going on. I do practice listening to positive self-talk, I have an app by a guy called Shad, Dr Shad Helmstetter, which contains a lot of programs of positive self-talk.

Now it seems that every six weeks, I have been doing it now for a couple of months, three months maybe, maybe 90 days, so three months, three months-ish. So it seems that every six weeks I have this issue crop up. Now after some research into it, I think that it’s something to do with the subconscious fighting the new, the deep-rooted stuff in my subconscious, the deep-rooted neural pathways, the positive ones fighting against the deep-rooted, well-established negative thoughts in my self-conscious, subconscious..

I fight in the new positive neurons which are programming into my brain now. So yeah, positive self-talk, neuroplasticity is something that I’ve been researching and using for the last, I’d say the last three months. It’s a habit now, I do it every day, I listen to at least half an hour a day of it, usually a lot more.

It’s just on in the background, playing, I don’t have to pay attention to it, I’m just there playing and it’s sort of rewiring my brain. So yeah, so that’s my sort of theory on why I felt so incredibly strange last week, I spaced out all week sort of thing, didn’t want to do anything and yeah, it was weird. Anyway I took a day out of the weekend, well a couple of days of really doing very little.

I came back yesterday sort of pretty charged up, ready to go for February. So yeah, February. Now I did used to be someone that didn’t really plan greatly, but I sort of used to have several jobs going at the same time, several projects going at the same time.

I don’t know if you remember the guys that used to spin the plates, yeah, used to have ten, fifteen plates spinning on rods and used to keep them all spinning. I used to feel like that at times, yeah. And totally unfocused, totally sort of go there, go there, go there.

So only recently have I changed and gone down the pathway of being focused, getting jobs done, planning the month, planning the week, planning the day, planning the quarter, planning the year, planning the next five years. Yeah, I’ve always had long term goals, but I’ve never had, never worked the plan backwards to what have I got to do now. So you’ve got a five year plan, a one year plan, a quarterly plan, a monthly plan, a weekly plan, a daily plan and a now plan.

What I’m going to do now to get to where I want to be in five years, yeah, it’s a good focus in, it’s a good focus in point. And yeah, these days I do write it down, I have a journal, a book, diary planner, whatever you want to call it, where I plan every week or every day as a daily planner. I plan what I, there’s a diary, there’s a small diary of what I’ve done today, what I, what I’ve learned today.

It’s important to learn something every day, every single day, so some knowledge I’ve learned today. Gratitude, something I’m grateful for today. Now, what did I put yesterday? I can’t remember what I put yesterday, something really weird.

Oh, it’s probably eggs actually. Yesterday for some reason I really appreciate eggs, because a simple egg, a simple chicken egg you can have in several different ways. So actually yesterday I had, for my breakfast, a hard boiled egg in some local bread, hot local bread, that’s beautiful.

And yesterday evening I had more eggs but in an omelette with some various vegetables and peppers and onions and bits like that, a little bit of cheese. But yeah, so, just really appreciate it. Eggs yesterday for some reason, so make yourself what you can, what you want, yeah? So yeah, then the planner, we do what I’m going to do tomorrow, yeah, the jobs I have to do tomorrow, what’s carrying forward tomorrow, four jobs to do tomorrow, four tasks that I have to do tomorrow in order of priority.

Get the first one done, get one done, as Paul O’Mahoney says, or eat that frog, eat the dead frog, as Brian Tracy says, get the first task done early as possible, in a session for the day. So yeah, that’s something  I’ve never done for most of my life, but I’ve started doing, and I get a lot of benefit from it to be honest, so it’s something that I highly recommend. And if you want any pointers on that I can certainly give you them, just drop me a message and I will give you any advice that you want, yeah?

One other thing that I’ve been reminded of the past week is the importance of a customer avatar in this business, in the online business, yeah? Obviously we don’t, we can’t see, who we’re writing any copy, we’re writing any adverts, writing any emails, any sort of thing for your customers, we need to know who we’re writing to, we need to have a picture in our brains of who we’re writing to, so a customer avatar.

I actually spent, not so long ago, I should have done it, I should have done it a long time ago, I should have done it two years ago, I did it actually last year, give myself a slap for that, for not doing it then, but yeah, so now my customer, my customer is a guy called Michael and a lady called Linda, they’re both around late forties, early fifties, so yeah, they are, I know all their, their pain points, what worries them, what scares them, what excites them, where they meet, where they meet online etc, what sort of hobbies they’re likely to have, right down to, to the music, so I think, I think that Michael is actually a big Dire Straits fan, and he loves playing golf, but the pain points, you know, is fear over the future, fear, fear over the economy, and you know, general things like that, but you know, I spent, I spent a day, I used ChatGPT to really go back in time and see what things had shaped these people’s lives to now.

it’s similar to mine I would guess, similar age range, I’m a little bit older maybe, but it helps you understand, and we shouldn’t forget actually that they are, they were adults after the internet started.  I believe that Google this year, yeah, Google this year turns 26 years old, so, you know, Google, there’s one 26 year old that probably actually does know everything!

But yeah, gives you some perspective of how new, how new the internet is, how new all these, all these things are, I think the first website was maybe, maybe 30, 30, 33 years ago maybe, something like that, but it’s not a long, not a long time, not a very long time ago, so yeah, it’s new to us all basically, isn’t it, so there’s your customer avatar,

Finally, I was on a webinar on Friday about going online like this, and the fear that people have of appearing online, which I can fully understand because I was exactly the same, if you asked me two years ago, when I first started mentoring, and Paul there said, you really need to get online because, you know, one day you’re going to be probably doing what I’m doing now, yeah, you’re going to be coaching and teaching and making webinars, and I thought, well, are you sure, Paul, and don’t you have to do that, so I had to change my attitude on that.

I am very self-conscious of the way I look, I’ve spent years, I’ve spent a lifetime very self-conscious of that scar there (on my forehead), which I got when I was three years old, I fell into an agricultural machine, a spinner that used to take potatoes out of the ground, it went straight across there and chopped my head open, my fault, I was watching sheep in the field opposite and just fell over and fell in it.  anyway, beside the point, but, you know, I was very subconscious of that, self-conscious, get these consciousnesses, correct, Stephen!

I’m also very self-conscious of my teeth, they are a bloody mess, and it is one of my priorities this year to get them sorted out, I think during COVID, we, well, actually, to start off with, I think I got the horrible teeth gene from my mother and father, my brother’s got beautiful teeth, but I’ve got the horrible tooth, probably from my mother’s side of the family, my mother had all of her teeth out before I was born, so that was, she was 19 when I was born, so, you know, her teeth weren’t good, and I think I’ve inherited them from her, anyway, that’s not a problem, but, you know, we come to COVID, you couldn’t get a dentist, and then, I don’t seem to be in one country, I should stay in one country, I don’t seem to be in one country long enough to get the treatment, but, hey, you know, I can still eat with them, they don’t look too good, but, as I say, it’s my, one of my aims this year to get them sorted out, and hopefully I will have enough money to afford some implants by the end of the year, so, something to look forward to, something to aim for, and I’m going to get there and get them done.

Yeah, so, appearing online, so I’ve got over that, and I also, I’m not a very good, I don’t believe I’m a very good speaker, those of you who are familiar with our ex- UKPrime Minister, I forgot his name, Boris, Boris Johnson, somebody told me once, I’m very, my presentation is the style of Boris Johnson, well, okay, fine, yeah, it didn’t do him much harm, getting to be Prime Minister, but, yeah, so,  there you go, it’s not a natural thing for me to do, to stand up and talk to other people, or to, in this case, a mobile phone, but I know, I know there are people watching because people are following my channel, so, it’s made me a little bit self-conscious, subconscious.

Also remember that, you know, if you’re selling online, that people do buy it from people, so, I think you need to get online, get over any self-doubt you have, get online, be yourself, be authentic, authenticity is the key these days, I think, yeah, going forward, authenticity will be the key, not some, someone dressed in fancy clothes at the side of a, an expensive sports car that they’ve hired for an hour, pretending to be something that they’re not, it’s about authenticity and being yourself, so, I would say, unless there’s a big, big reason why you can’t do it, get yourself online,  if you are intending to build an online business get your face online, so people can see you, because people do buy from people still.

Okay, if you, I hope you enjoyed that, and I’ll just say, anything you want me to cover in future, future videos or in sort of shorter trainings on the blog or on here, on YouTube or on the blog, just please let me know and I’ll see what I can do, I’ll make time to do them, as I say, we are customer focused, I am customer focused, it’s just me now, and waiting to help you.

Okay, thank you very much and goodbye for now.