Joel Miller:
Life, as I’m sure you’re aware, is full of challenges. And one of those challenges that we have, honestly, it’s the voice in our head. Sometimes that voice tells us good things.

The Narrator:
Maybe you should go for a walk outside. This situation has me stumped. I should probably go talk to somebody who knows something about it. I really should take a moment and read a book to my child.

Joel Miller:
Sometimes not so good things.

The Narrator:
The weather’s awful. There’s no point going out. I can’t see my way out of this. I guess there isn’t one. Maybe now is the time to learn to play accordion.

Joel Miller:
That voice in your head is busy feeding you strategies all day long.

The Narrator:
I’m going to have that tough conversation with Mark. I hate these conversations.

Joel Miller:
Strategies on how to do the next thing you need to do or strategies on things even further.

The Narrator:
Yes, one more task and I can check off-

Joel Miller:
Sometimes those strategies are great, sometimes they’re not. I’m going to blow off early, but whether good or bad every time they’re based on the very same thing, a story, and that story’s served up to you by your narrator, a function of your own brain.
You know what a narrator does. If you’re watching a movie, the narrator sets the scene. He explains the action. He directs your attention to what matters as the scene shifts from one to the next. The narrator governs what you think about what you see. And that’s not just television. That’s going on between your ears all day long. Now, there’s one big difference. When you are sitting in a chair watching somebody else’s narrator serve you a story, you’re a passive participant, but you are not a passive participant for the narrator operating in your own mind. You actually have the ability to step in. And if you need to, redirect that story. You have the ability to step in and change the trajectory of the events by rethinking what the narrator is telling you. And that is a powerful, powerful tool. Not only are you able to analyze a situation that you’re in, but you’re able to analyze your analysis.
And that means you can come up with better analyses, which means better strategies, better responses, and that of course means better results. And you can do this if and only if you listen to this podcast, well, maybe not exactly only this podcast, but I recommend that you do. For one thing, our founder and chairman Michael Hyatt and our CEO, Megan Hyatt Miller have written a new book that comes out when? Today, now called Mind Your Mindset: the Science That Shows Success Starts With Your Thinking. You can go get it right now at mindyourmindsetbook.com, or really anywhere books are sold. And if you’re inclined to do so, please do.
But… And this is an important but, you don’t have to do that at this very second. I hope at the end of this episode you’ll realize how important that might actually be. But first, you’re going to want to listen to this conversation between Michael, Megan, and myself. They talk about how to challenge the narrator when you need to and how to put it to constructive work for you.
Hi, I’m Joel Miller, chief product officer here at Full Focus, and this is the Business Accelerator podcast. I think you are going to love this conversation with Michael and Megan about the narrator, and we’ll get to it right after this break.
It’s launch day for Mind Your Mindset. And Michael and Megan are here to talk about their new book, which I’m super excited about. I know a lot of our listeners are super excited about, and I’m pretty sure Michael and Megan are super excited about it also. I just want to jump in and start asking some questions. So feel free to weigh in how you want on these, but here’s where I’m starting with. Okay? Early in the book you mentioned that there’s an action bias that business owners can have. What’s the problem that being biased to action might get us into?

Michael Hyatt:
Well, it’s not really a problem in a sense. It’s only a problem if that’s all you do. So it’s really easy. And speaking as somebody who’s very much a quick start type of person, it’s real really easy for me to fall back to the strategy of ready, fire, aim, and to not think. And our actions are important because taking action, most of us have learned this as business owners, it’s what drives the results, but there’s something that drives the actions or the behaviors that we often don’t think about, and that is our thinking. And so this entire book is about learning how to think about our thinking so that we can have better, more effective actions, so we can drive better results for the organizations that we lead.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, I mean, I would say that if you don’t like the results you’re getting, then your action bias might not be serving you. Because if our actions ultimately lead to our results and our thinking is driving the actions that we’re taking, if you want better results and you’re going to have to go further upstream than just your actions if you want to get access to a kind of results that you haven’t gotten until now. So that’s exciting to me. As much as I default to that action bias as my kind of native language, also I realize there may be an untapped way of getting another level of performance for myself. And in fact there, that’s what the science tells us.

Joel Miller:
So there is this default that we have to take action and our listeners are successful people, therefore the actions that they take tend to be successful actions. They tend to be positive and effective. But when they aren’t, you’re saying you got to step back and see where the strategy that you’re employing is not working. And that comes down to the story you’re telling yourself about it. It comes down to the thinking work behind it.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s right. And I think it’s hard work, and it’s rarely done by leaders because when we’re thinking, we may be thinking about what are the people are thinking or what they’re doing or we’re thinking about a lot of things. But very few of us practice this sort of ultimate form of self-awareness, which is thinking about our thinking.

Joel Miller:
Now that thinking about our thinking has a name in the book, the thinking that we’re doing without realizing it comes from almost like a character. You can imagine him sitting on your shoulder from time to time. It’s the narrator. Tell us what is the narrator? Who is the narrator?

Michael Hyatt:
I want to give you an example. So as you guys know, and most our listeners know, I had a heart attack in September. I went in for bypass surgery. And then as a part of that, they assigned me when I came out to cardiac rehab. So I’m sitting around with my eight fellow cardiac rehab participants, and they were asking us, what does this heart attack mean for you? And one guy said, he said, “I think the thing I’ve been thinking about is that this means it’s the beginning of the end. From this point forward, I’m just in a state of decline and it’s going to get worse from here.” Now, that was the narrator, a narrator inside his head, and he was giving voice to the narrator because it could be a completely different story if he wanted it to be a different story.
I had a different result at that time, and I had, for example, one of my doctors call me while I was in the hospital, and he said to me, he said, “Look, what’s happened has happened. I don’t want you to give it another thought. You are maintaining a healthy lifestyle. You did the best you could, but the genetics caught up with you, but your entire life is in front of you.” And he said, “This is an opportunity for you to reboot and reevaluate where you want to spend your time and energy. You’ve got the rest of your life in front of you.”
Now, that was a different, completely different kind of narration. And so I think just to become conscious that there’s this voice, this narrator in our heads. And sometimes for me, frankly, it’s a committee. It’s more than a narrator, but these people are saying things and we just assume that that voice in our head that’s providing the narration, sort of like a color commentator on a football game who’s given you the commentary of everything that’s happening, that could be informed, that can be changed. We don’t just have to accept what the narrator says “as the truth.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Joel, I think one of the big ideas in this book, Mind Your Mindset, is that there’s what happens to us, and these are things that we could observe on a police report or sort of some legal statement, an interrogatory that you might have to give answer to. And then there’s what we say about it, and the narrator’s job is to make up a story to make sense of the events of our lives. And that can be either empowering or disempowering, which I’m sure we’ll talk more about as we progress in our conversation here. But the narrator is usually concerned with keeping us safe, self-protection, those kinds of things. And so that voice in our head tends to be one of scarcity and protection and those kinds of things, not always, but especially depending on our life circumstances. And so the interpretations that he or she has in our head really tend to drive the actions we take because those stories inform what it means.
Back to the example dad that you just gave about your fellow cardiac rehab patient. If you think this is the beginning of the end, the actions that you’re going to take with regard to your health and wellbeing are very different than the actions that you’re going to take if you think your whole life is in front of you, totally different. So the interpretation of the events that we have, which by the way is entirely subjective, is going to dictate the actions that we take and therefore to some degree the results that we get. And so that’s why the narrator is so important to become conscious of.

Joel Miller:
We’re looking at this primarily right now through a general lens. It’s personal. It could be business, but this shows up in business all the time. Can you give us an example of where the narrator might steer a business owner or an entrepreneur wrong with maybe an employee or a strategy that they’re trying to work on or anything like that?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Let’s just say that your sales team wasn’t performing the way that you hoped. And you sit down and you bring that person in or those people in to talk about it and you’re having a meeting. Very often, the results are, the situation is that we missed our numbers this month or over some period of time, and here are the numbers. The narrator shows up in what those people are going to say about it and what you are saying to yourself about what it means and their capabilities. And so where this really gets into trouble, and I think for business owners, as our friend McLaren says, this kind of gets biggie sized because it’s not just your own narrator that you’re contending with. You’re contending with the narrator that your team members have. And so if they think, for example, well, I don’t think we could possibly hit our numbers this month because it’s a short month because of the holiday, or I don’t think we can possibly hit our numbers. We’re behind this month because everybody’s focused on some major event in the news.
When those interpretations of the facts why we’re not hitting our numbers, which is really what the narrator’s trying to answer, when that answer is defeatist in that way and all of a sudden you or the people you’re leading have no control in the situation, well then, the likelihood that the results are going to improve is nil because nobody’s going to be predisposed to finding solutions that they have control over because they’ve already accepted the narrator’s story that they don’t have any control, and this is happening outside of themselves. And so I think this is where if you’re really concerned as a business owner with driving performance in yourself, in your team, as one of the coaches that I’ve had the privilege of working with in the past said, we’ve got to coach thinking and stop coaching doing all the time because we so naturally default to coaching people’s actions that we don’t ever go far enough upstream to realize what’s driving the behavior that’s producing the results that I don’t like in my business.

Joel Miller:
Yeah. Megan, you used the word control there, and that reminds me of a story very similar to what you just described that Michael tells in the book. Michael, tell us about your exchange with Eileen.

Michael Hyatt:
So this happened back in about 2009. We were in the throes of the great recession, and we had just missed our July sales numbers. And so Eileen was my executive coach. She came in once a month and she spent the entire day with me. And so one of the first questions she asked was, she said, this was in early August. She said, “So how did last month turn out?” And I said, “Not great.” She said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, we missed it.” I don’t remember what it was like 10% on the top line. We missed the bottom line. And she said, “Gosh, when I was here last time, you were so confident that you had it in the bag.” And I said, “I know, but unfortunately, the environment conspired against us.” She said, “What do you mean by that? And I said, “Well, we’ve got a recession going on.”
And oh, by the way, in our industry, the book publishing industry, we’ve got this digital revolution going on. People are moving to Kindle. There’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace. We don’t know if print’s going to last or if it’s going to continue or what the size of the market’s going to be. And I said, on top of that, it just feels like everything in the marketing world is upside down because the things we used to do aren’t working the way they were. And so now we’re trying to learn social media. So yeah, it’s all this stuff that’s influenced us. So basically what I was saying was, the problem is out there, and it’s not a problem I can address. It’s beyond my control. So she patiently listened to me and she said, “Okay, I get it. There’s a recession, turmoil in your industry, all of that. But what was it about your leadership that led to these results?”
Well, that ticked me off because I thought to myself, and I didn’t say this out loud, but I thought, how dare you? First of all, I’ve just explained to you this is a macroeconomic macro problem, and I didn’t say these exact words, but I don’t have any agency over this. In other words, I’m a victim. I didn’t say that either, but she said… But I made excuses. And she said, “Okay, I get that there’s these outside factors, but what was it about your leadership?” So I’m getting increasingly frustrated. I tried to go through the whole thing again. And she said, “Okay, let me just state it another way. If you could go back 30 or 45 days, is there anything you would’ve done differently with your sales team that might have led to a different result?”
And I said, “Oh, absolutely.” She said, “Like what?” And so I said, “Well, I probably would’ve went on that sales call to Walmart, maybe the one to Target. I would’ve been checking in with the team, a short standup meeting every day to see what was happening, where they were making progress, where the roadblocks were, et cetera, et cetera.” And so I spent about five minutes talking about that, and she said, “Okay, so here’s what I hear you say. It was your leadership because you didn’t do those things.”
I mean, it was like a light bulb moment for me because I realized I don’t have to be the victim, and the bad news is I had to take responsibility for those results. The good news is I could change those results going forward if I owned them. But the way I was thinking about the problem and the world was the problem. It was the way I was thinking that was the problem. Not what I did or what I didn’t do, but the way I was thinking about it.

Joel Miller:
Hey, I’m going to jump in for just a quick second. We got a break to take. We’ll be right back.
So what is the source of that thinking? When we think about stories, when we think about these narratives that we’re telling ourselves, they seem to be composed of two things. There’s assumptions about the past, and then there are these projections about the future, and those two things come together to create the stories that we tell. How does that work?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think it goes back to what I was saying about the narrator being primarily concerned with protecting us and being very conscious of its own perceived scarcity in the world. And so when it thinks about bad things that have happened to you in the past or negative experiences, it really wants to avoid those. And your brain is very good at projecting and forecasting what might happen that could be bad in the future. And so, it’s basically tasked with trying to help you avoid danger. And so those things come together to form a picture that’s basically the risk picture, and how can it enable you to navigate through those with as little impact from that risk as possible. And so I think that’s when you’ve had real risk that you’ve realized in the past, and then you have potential risk in the future that might feel like the things that you’ve experienced in the past and you know don’t want any more of that or something you were adjacent to. And so your narrator is working hard to avoid both of those things on your behalf.

Joel Miller:
That interaction, Megan, Michael, between past risk that you’ve endured and future risks that you might endure, seems to give us our sense of what’s possible. So that narrator is now telling us what’s possible based on what we’ve experienced in the past and what we can imagine about the future. That seems to me like that’s the path that we’re on.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, it is, and I think nothing better illustrates this point than an NFL football game this past fall that was the greatest comeback in NFL history. So let me just set it up. Some of you watched this game, but this was the Indianapolis Colts led the Vikings 33 to zero at the half. So for most of us, we looked at that, a lot of people turned off their TVs. Some people got up and left the field that were there in person because why? Because we know what history would say. No one can come back from that big of a deficit, 33 to zero. It’s never happened in the history of professional football. The amazing thing was in the locker room, this was reported afterwards, the quarterback, Patrick Peterson walked into the Vikings locker room at halftime, and he fired off one of the most absurd challenges ever uttered. He said, “We only need five touchdowns to win this game.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
That’s crazy.

Michael Hyatt:
I mean, easy, peasy. But the coach said he didn’t know if he was kidding or not, but it completely changed the framework or the way of thinking of the entire team. They said, yeah, we’ve done five touchdowns before. We can do this. Absolutely. And so they went in and won the game. And I think it’s just such a great example of somebody shifting the thinking and shifting the possibility of the thinking by just pointing out something that wasn’t conscious to everybody else. Everybody else was listening to the narrator.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
What’s interesting about that story is that the language that he used, we only need five touchdowns.

Michael Hyatt:
Yes.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Because you could have said the same thing, in order to win this game, guys, we’d have to get five touchdowns. I mean, that’s impossible. But the way that he said it, we only need only five touchdowns like implied we’ve done that before. That makes it sound suddenly doable. And you can almost just see the light bulbs going off in everybody’s head in that locker room, like, oh yeah, five touchdowns. Okay, we just go out and execute one after the other after the other. Yeah, we could do that. I could imagine that. And all of a sudden they have a story that’s empowering.

Joel Miller:
What’s great about that story is it encapsulates a framework that you actually detail in the book. So there is a three part framework that will allow you to have your own halftime reboot for your own game. I wonder if you guys could just walk us through what is this three step framework that will enable you to win your own personal comeback?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, the first step is to identify the story that you’re telling yourself. And so probably all those guys walked into the locker room thinking, there is no way that we can come back after this. I mean, this game is as good as lost, but it’s going from having an unconscious experience with a narrator to having a conscious one. The second thing is to interrogate the story. So there’s no way we can come back from this. Well, have we ever made five touchdowns before? That would be a question you could ask yourself. You know, start to basically try to shake loose that belief from the circumstances. Is it really impossible to come back from this? What other evidence might we have? And you just sort of start to shake that loose, and we talk about that in more detail in the book. And then you imagine a better story, you imagine a better result.
And that example of all we need are five touchdowns. That’s the better story. And all of a sudden that team was able to emotionally connect with that from a guy that, by the way, wasn’t even the coach. I’m thinking to myself, make that guy a coach. He needs to be a coach. He’s got what it takes. But when you go from identifying the story that you’re telling yourself by default, which Joel, we haven’t said this, but your brain is just trying to help you. There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re default stories that pop up from your narrator are negative and disempowering. That just means your brain’s trying to keep you safe. Congratulations, you’re human. But when you start to become conscious of those and you identify them, then you can go to that next step of interrogating them and starting to shake them loose and realize, oh, this is just one interpretation. There might be others. What else could I think here? And then you really dig in hard to that last step of imagine a better story.

Joel Miller:
Can you walk us back to that sales meeting that you kind of described earlier on and give us the same steps in that imaginary sales meeting?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. Well, this is a vulnerable thing to do as a leader. I’ve done this before. You have to prepare your heart as sometimes we jokingly say around here to deal with a lot of people’s negativity. You have to be willing to hold space for people to be vulnerable. And you have to do your best to make it safe for people to be vulnerable and share things. And normally they’re not going to say out loud in front of the boss at least. They might say it to their spouse when they get home at the end of the day, or to their coworker, but not necessarily you. And so you might have to even go first with some of the things you’re thinking, but you could start by saying, okay, tell me some of the stories that you’re thinking as we are sitting here on December 15th and we’re behind by 25% or whatever your circumstances are.
And hopefully, you’ve got one person in that group at least that’ll be brave, and they’ll start to give you some examples. Well, I just think we’ve got 10 days before Christmas. There’s no way nobody cares about whatever we’re selling. They just want to get home and go eat turkey and wrap presents with their families. Okay, great. You write it up on the whiteboard. And you basically just get all that stuff out there and it’s almost like people are sort of vomiting it up. Let’s get it out of your head where it’s controlling you, but you don’t realize it’s controlling you.
And then let’s start to shake that loose and the interrogate step. Let’s start asking questions about these things. Has there ever been a time when this wasn’t true? Do we see any exceptions to this? What else could be true? What else could be going on for people? Well, maybe they really need this because in the new year something else is going to happen. It’s going to really set them up, and if they had this, it would be just incredible for them. So you start thinking about that and you really try to separate the belief from the results that you’re experiencing, that narrative.

Michael Hyatt:
If I could interrupt you, I think you’re also trying to separate the facts from the perception.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
Because a lot of what we cite in a meeting like that, we think it’s a fact, but it’s just an opinion or it’s our limited experience. It’s our perspective. And I think that it’s important to separate the facts because those can’t be changed, but the way we assemble them together in a story can be changed. And that could be all the difference.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
For example, December 15th, that today is December 15th in our example here, that’s a fact. The number on the scoreboard for the revenue you’ve generated so far, the sales you’ve generated for that month, that’s a fact. The fact that nobody cares about the product you’re selling until the new year rolls over, that is not a fact. That’s an opinion. I mean, you probably have not had that conversation with every prospect you’ve talked to. So that’s what we’re talking about here in this interrogate step. And just doing that just to realize that those interpretations are subjective will be empowering to your team. And then you get busy with imagining, okay, what else might we want to believe here? That could be equally true, that could feel equally true, but that would actually empower us to achieve this goal regardless that is in our control. And that’s when you wipe the whiteboard clean and you start writing those ideas for new interpretations up on the board.
And what you will see that happens is people are going through this exercise is they realize they have power. They don’t have total control. They can’t change that it’s December 15th, and they can’t change the number now that’s on the board, but they still have time on the clock, and there’s still plays to be made. And they get to decide what those plays are. Together, you decide what those are. And I think that is my favorite part about going through this with a group or with somebody who’s a direct report is like you said dad, in your example with Eileen, you’re kind of offended like that you don’t get to kind of hide out in your nice comfortable story where you don’t have any control, because that feels better than being hung out to dry, exposed, that you’ve failed. But on the other hand, when you get to the part where you’re imagining something else, it feels really good because you all of a sudden feel a sense of control again, and you realize you’re actually not a victim. And that’s good news, bad news.

Michael Hyatt:
You get the power back.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Joel Miller:
What is some of the language that people might use ourselves, our employees that we might use that indicate we’re telling ourselves a disempowering story?

Michael Hyatt:
Well, sometimes you can globalize. You can just say, for example, I had a really important mentor say to me at one point, he just said, “You’re not very good with money, are you? And that was on the heels of a company that I was leading that had basically gone bankrupt.” And so that became this overarching story that controlled everything until I finally said, is that really true that I’m not very good with money, or do I just need to be educated to be better with money?
And so I think that sometimes that’s where… It’s not that the facts aren’t friendly, the facts are friendly, but we need to consider more facts. And the truth was that I was coming to a conclusion based on very scant evidence. I had merely run one company into the ground. It wasn’t my entire life. But when I began to shake loose that assumption and challenge that story, I thought I can get better at this. And I think I’m pretty good at managing money now. I think I’m pretty good at all the financial aspects of the business, but I’m never going to be a CFO. But I can have a working useful knowledge of the financial parts of the business that lead us to financial success. And so I think sometimes you just have to put other facts on the table that are equally important.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, Joel, I find that oftentimes people will say things like, I could never, or it’s always like, or no matter what, this always happens, or every time such and such and such happens. So when you’re making these kind of statements, they tell you in relationships, you’re never supposed to say things like you always or you never. It’s like we do that about ourselves and we do that about the world, and we do that about other people. And that’s how it usually shows up. It sounds very certain, and yet it’s almost entirely subjective or our opinion.

Michael Hyatt:
You might say to yourself when you tell this story in the book, Megan, that you were deathly afraid of public speaking. You could never be a public speaker, and yet you worked through that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right. Exactly. And yet I believed with all my heart that it would probably literally kill me if I tried. And as it turned out, it did not.

Michael Hyatt:
Because that wasn’t a fact. It was only an opinion, and it was based on very scant evidence.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yes.

Joel Miller:
All right. So let’s say Megan’s reluctance to speak. You’ve identified this story and you’ve interrogated it. You’ve decided that no, maybe that’s not the whole story. Maybe that’s not the whole truth. Maybe there’s another way of looking at it. That gets us into the imagine stage. That gets us into telling a news story. What are some tools people can use to tell themselves more empowering stories?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, when I was dealing with this debilitating fear, you said reluctance. I would say debilitating fear of public speaking, I got really clear on what it was costing me professionally, personally to stay stuck in that fear. And I didn’t want it anymore. And so when I was thinking about imagining something better, I literally wrote about a page and a half or two on a yellow legal pad of what it would be like, what it would feel like in my body, psychologically, et cetera, to deliver a speech in front of 800 people, which is to steal my thunder. And the story in the book, that’s what I ended up doing. My very first keynote was in front of 800 people, which is a heck of a way to start. But for weeks, for six weeks leading up to that, I read out loud that vision, that imagination of a better story, a better outcome to the experience of standing in front of people and speaking.
And at first it felt pretty farfetched, and I didn’t say I’m the best speaker in the whole world. It wasn’t some kind of affirmation that was so farfetched, I couldn’t connect to it at all. It felt very much like me, but it was the version of me that I really wanted and hoped for, and I just kept saying it and try to emotionally inhabit it. And over time, by the time I actually got to six weeks later standing on that stage in front of 800 people, it actually played out almost exactly like I had written it, because I had been very intentional about tuning my mind to a new story and a new experience of reality. So I think what happened is that my brain went to work on creating that in that reality. Those feelings, that physical experience, the connection with the audience, the delivery, all those things, which I was very detailed about, that story, my brain went to work on making that happen.
And that’s the thing that’s so important about imagining a new story, is that the story that you’re telling yourself predisposes your brain to look for certain solutions. And so if I had a story of, I’m pretty sure this speaking in front of 800 people will kill me and I’ll run out humiliated. Well, my brain would’ve gone to work on, oh gosh, that sounds terrible. Let’s make sure we’re very clear on when that’s going to happen so she can avoid it. And almost certainly it would’ve happened.
Instead, I really tuned my brain with this new story to I’m going to be able to effectively communicate to these people. I’m going to enjoy it. It’s going to be fun. And it was all of those things. And I think that’s because my brain went to work on finding pathways there. Now, that’s not to say I didn’t work very hard during those six weeks, or that it wasn’t difficult, or I didn’t have to confront real anxiety. I absolutely did. This is not magical. This involves hard work. This is not some kind of woo-woo thing. However, I got way different results with that story than I would’ve otherwise.

Michael Hyatt:
It’s almost like you’re reprogramming the narrator or you’re writing a new script for the narrator to give. And this is where our brains are like a computer. They can be reprogrammed. And this is what the neuroscience shows us, that there’s a certain flexibility or plasticity to our brains that the neuro pathways can be reformed through imagination, through repetition, and we can create a different reality based on a different story. In fact, I would suggest that it’s rare that we experience a new reality without creating a new story. That’s where it has to start.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And that’s really exciting.

Joel Miller:
The magic of Mind Your Mindset is it walks you through that entire process from recognizing where the story is coming from, to seeing how it’s impacting our results, to then being free to interrogate it, and then imagine something better. And as we come to a close on this, I just thought I’d ask, what is it from this that a business owner can take away to change the results in their business?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I was talking to some clients earlier, and I was saying the biggest obstacle that we all face are not the obstacles that are out there in the market or with our products or our customers. It’s with ourselves. Our businesses are not going to grow beyond our own capabilities and really beyond our own stories. And so if we can learn to spot the stories we’re telling by default, and then eventually to interrogate those and to write better stories, then we can ultimately write a vision and a strategy to get to a much bigger version of reality in our businesses than we maybe ever considered before. And if you find yourself struggling with the same problems or the same obstacles that you just… You’re not sure how to get a breakthrough on, it’s likely that the problem is not in your strategies or your actions, at least only symptomatically it is. The problem is in your thinking. And what I love about this book is that it outlines a really simple process for you to unlock things that have maybe felt like a black box for you for years and years.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, I think there’s tremendous power in becoming self-aware about our thinking and trying to understand the stories that are driving our behavior that’s delivering the results. And I think previously I would just sort of redouble my effort. I would take more action, more of an action bias, try to muscle through it to change your results, and sometimes you can get an incremental improvement. But if you want to breakthrough improvement, if you want something significantly better for your future, whether it’s professional or personal, that has to start with your thinking with questionnaire assumptions and coming up with a different story that can drive that behavior that leads to a different kind of result.

Joel Miller:
Michael, Megan, thank you so much for writing this book and sharing it with us today.

Michael Hyatt:
Thank you, Joel.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Thanks, Joel.

Joel Miller:
Normally at this point in the episode, I bring us in for a landing. I kind of do some summary work. I remind the audience kind of what we covered and what it meant, and then I do a pitch for business accelerator. You’re aware of that. You know that’s coming, but it’s not. Why? Because today we’re here talking primarily about Mind Your Mindset, Michael and Megan’s new book. And if I could just leave you with one thing, it would be this.
If you are in business for yourself and you find yourself stuck, if you are in business for yourself and things are going swimmingly, things are going great, you’d like to up-level where you’re at, the reality is the path either out or up is the same. It is getting the narrator to work on your behalf more often than not, and that requires thinking about your thinking. And there is, at this point in human history, no source better for that kind of work than Mind Your Mindset, Michael and Megan’s new book. I can say that with all the bias that I bring to it, being a member of the Full Focus family, you will have to qualify that in your own special way. But just take me up on this bet. Get the book. See if it doesn’t make a difference in your business. You can find out more at mindyourmindsetbook.com. That’s mindyourmindsetbook.com.
That’s it for another episode of The Business Accelerator Podcast. We’ll be back next week with more conversations to help you accelerate your business.