Jeff-Goins IBC 1-2

Jeff-Goins IBC 1-2

[Music playing, typing]

Hi, and welcome back. In this lesson before we get into the nuts and bolts of blogging, I want to talk about something that’s important, something that you may have overlooked, something that I overlooked for many, many years.

I want to talk about mindset. See, before you can succeed at blogging, or anything, I think you have to develop a successful mindset. You have to be willing and focused on succeeding.

And, honestly, for me, one of the things I struggled with for a long time was envy. And I think this was the root of failure for me. For eight years of trying to blog, trying to figure this out I failed. Why? Because I would look around at people, and I would be jealous of them. I would look at them, I’d go, “Why is this person succeeding at writing, or blogging, or getting a book published?” It didn’t seem fair.

But the reality was, I was looking at what they were doing, but I wasn’t asking myself an important question which is, “What are they doing that I’m not doing?” What are they doing that I could try even if I think, “Aw, that would never work,” and apply and try to achieve the same level of success or more than they’re achieving?

So, before you begin, I want you to think about, what is the mindset that you’re bringing into your blog? Whether you’ve been doing it for years as I had and not really succeeding at it, or you’re starting fresh today. It’s important to develop a winning mindset.

And that looks like this. First, you have to ask questions. An important question for me to ask was, “What is this person doing that I’m not doing?”

Second, you have to be humble. You have to be willing to accept that you don’t know everything about your field of expertise, or your industry, or whatever it is that you’re writing about. And this can be really hard for those of us who don’t feel like beginners. And I certainly didn’t feel like a beginner. I felt like I’d been writing for almost 10 years. And, in fact, I’d been teaching other writers, and teaching other bloggers how to blog. So, why did I need to go try what other people were doing? That didn’t make any sense. Except that I didn’t really know how to develop my own blog, how to develop my own personal brand. And, so, it was really important for me to look around at the blogosphere and ask questions; and, then, be humble about the answers that I was receiving.

Then the third, and final, thing that you want to do is you have to be willing to try new things. For me that meant writing about topics that I was familiar with that I thought, “Oh, nobody wants to hear about that. Nobody wants to hear about writing. I want to talk about leadership, or personal development.”

And the reality was that, I was ignoring an important subject that in many ways has become the cornerstone of all of my blogging efforts. Why? Because I just thought that people didn’t care about that. And when I finally asked the right questions, I was humble about what I learned, and, then, tried new things. It made a difference.

And, so, what I want you to do now is do one thing. It might sound a little bit silly, but I think this is really important. Like I said, for seven or eight years, I had no more than 100 blog readers. And when I changed my mindset, when I started thinking of myself as a blogger, and as a writer, and as somebody who was going to succeed not in some weird pie-in-the-sky, you know, outlandish goal-setting way, but just in the way I started thinking about myself different. I started thinking like a successful person. Things started to change very quickly. And I spent seven years getting 100 readers, and, then, in a year and a half I had over 100,000 readers.

What was the difference? I believe one of the big things about it, where it all began, was with this winning, successful mindset. And, so, I want you to decide to succeed. Decide that you’re going to succeed. And that can look very different for you. It doesn’t have to mean a certain number of readers. It can be reaching the right kind of reader. It can be writing the kind of content that you can be proud of. But you have to decide right now, what does success look like, and how are you going to achieve it?

And a great place to start is with those three areas that I talked about: Ask good questions. Be humble about the answers that you receive, and be willing to try new things. And we’ll talk about more about that in the next video.