Internet Business Mastery: Business Development and Internet Marketing for the Web 2.0 Age

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Sterling: This is Internet Business Mastery, episode 100.

In a world where bosses control your life, and thoughts of escape fill your mind, where inspiration seems dead and cynicism rules the masses. You have a desire to break free; you feel the need to take control. Now there exists a place where the secrets of freedom and wealth are given to those who believe. Internet Business Mastery.com – free your mind!

Sterling: Hello, and welcome to the 100^th episode of Internet Business Mastery online at Internet Business Mastery.com, I’m Sterling….

Jay: And for the hundredth time, I’m Jay….

Sterling: And we’re here to help you escape the ‘9 to 5’ and live the lifestyle of your dreams by turning your life’s passion into a profitable internet business, even if you’re just getting started today. On this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we reveal the secret sauce for finally succeeding in online business, and in the Quick Tip, we have a tool for easily creating a mockup of a new website design.

And we’d also like to remind you that if you’d like to get a jumpstart on creating your own profitable internet business using our proven system, you can claim your risk free trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy by going to freeaudiogift.com.

So Jay, a hundred episodes! Who would have thought?

Jay: Who’da thought? A hundred episodes, did you think we’d get to a hundred when we started in…let’s see October 2005? Did you think we’d make a hundred of these?

Sterling: Is that when it was? I mean back then it sounded like a lot to do ten, especially we were doing it like once a month or just whenever we got around to it. So thinking of doing a hundred episodes back then would have been what the heck, how would we even do that? It would take ten years!

Jay: Right, and in light of over the weekend, for those of you who listen to Sterling and I, we were at a little mastermind group talking a lot about…the focus of the group was figuring out what our strengths were, what our unique abilities were, what fulfilled us and making sure the percentage of time we spent doing those things was as high as possible. And we kept saying multiple times how fortunate we felt that we had a business and an outlet for using our unique abilities.

And that’s something we’re still fine tuning the language of but for both of us it has to do with sharing resources and ideas, and inspiring people to the new levels of purpose, and freedom, and happiness. And so the show is obviously a critical part of that, of having that voice, of sharing those ideas with people all over the world. I mean the show’s been listened to in like 120 plus different countries, which is pretty amazing. So I don’t even know if I thought we’d make it to 100, it’s funny, as much as we talk about planning head and knowing what your destination is, it’s funny how little of that we did.

We just kind of started this thing and here we are 100 episodes later, a thriving business that meets our fulfillment factors, that meets the grand purpose that provides us a great living and also helps us to just reach out and impact the lives of a lot of people so I guess that’s pretty amazing, and pretty happy about that.

Sterling: Yeah I mean considering when we started it was just because we loved marketing so much and internet business we wanted to talk about it. And we had our other internet businesses that we were doing and this was just for fun, yeah it’s been awesome to see what it’s come to. And for me especially the mission that we had even from the start has just grown, and grown, and grown for me. I love it even more now.

Jay: I guess just another testament to just diving in and taking action, we’re like well let’s just try this thing out and here we are five years later, which is a very appropriate segway into the topic of today – the secret sauce of finally succeeding in online business. So let’s go ahead and dive in and talk about…what flavor do you think the sauce is? BBQ maybe, maybe a little zesty chipotle?

Sterling: I guess it depends on everybody’s own taste.

Jay: Ooh, good answer! That is a good answer. Alright, let’s dive into the featured segment.

And now the featured segment…

Jay: So Sterling, I don’t know about you but when you’re a fledgining entrepreneur, you think looking into this whole idea of internet business – going to seminars, maybe listening to a show like ours, maybe going through a course, at some point or at several points along the way there seems to be this thought that you’re trying different things out.

Some things are working, some things aren’t, maybe you’re not quite making the progress that you want – at some point you go man, there’s got to be some kind of secret sauce. There’s something they’re not telling me, there’s something they’re holding back behind the scenes. It’s like the magic BBQ sauce on your ribs and you’re like man, what’s that ingredient they’re putting in there that makes it so good because when I go home and do it myself it’s just not the same. Did you ever have that thought like man, there’s got to be a secret sauce?

Sterling: Yeah pretty quick, and I don’t think I would have ever guessed at the time what it actually was. I would have thought ooh, it’s a special way they do their sales page, or a certain little tweak they do to their auto responder series, or some little thing like that. And of course now we know what it is, it makes perfect sense. But yeah, back then I wouldn’t have thought of this. And I haven’t actually heard of anybody else talking about it. So this is kind of fun to be revealing this finally.

Jay: Yeah and I am lifelong learner for sure and I’ve gone through a lot of seminars and courses and I can’t recall anybody ever speaking to this. And yeah it was the same thing for me, there’s got to be secret sauce and it’s got to be a magic traffic source that they’re not telling me.

But it was maybe a little surprising and also liberating and awesome to kind of figure out what it finally was and I haven’t heard anybody else talking about this either. And it definitely goes back to what we talked about in the last episode, episode 99. We were talking about how to fail in online business and life in three easy steps. And basically we outlined the three pillars of happiness which were freedom – to have more freedom in your life, the freedom to live your life the way you want to, to live where you want to, to spend the time the way you want to.

It’s something as human beings that fulfill us all, and then to be able to have worthwhile relationships and connect with the world around us in a way that fulfills us with our families, colleagues, girlfriend/boyfriend, whoever it might be. And then the third pillar was purpose, to have some fulfillment of who we are and what we have to offer the world, to leave something behind in the world so to speak as well.

And when we find that nice combination of freedom and connection with other people, relationships and purpose that leads to success and happiness but all those things require taking action towards them. And so we proposed the three ways to fail would be to…that there were only three ways to fail and we always talk about there’s no failure, there’s feedback, and that we learn from our mistakes and at some point we expect to go to bat and strike out every once in a while but there’s this proposal that the only way to really fail in business or in life was to get to the end of everything and go dang, I didn’t really strive for the kind of freedom I wanted, I didn’t strive to really fulfill the purpose I felt for myself, or I didn’t strive to have whatever meaningful relationships or connections with people that felt right to me.

And that would be the most unfortunate thing, to reach the end of your life or some later stage in your life and go oh wow, I didn’t take enough action towards those things. So the solution that we came up with was to take consistent action in congruence with your definitions of freedom, relationships, and purpose and to design your life and your business around those things, and continually taking action.

But this assumes two things and that’s where we lead into the secret sauce that we’re getting to here. It assumes taking action towards these things, striving for these things, it assumes that number one – you have confidence in your right, in the fact that you deserve to be happy and have success so you feel worthy of having that kind of freedom, of having that kind of relationships, that kind of purpose and number two that you have confidence in your ability to manage all the challenges of life and to achieve, that you have the ability within you to achieve the level of freedom, and relationships, and purpose.

So both that you feel worthy of it and that you have the confidence and the ability to actually achieve those things, and so the top key that we’re talking about today, the top secret sauce for reaching that level of freedom, relationships, and purpose is a simple two word phrase called self-esteem.

Now immediately I’m sure there’s a lot of things that flow into your mind as to what self-esteem means and this has definitely been a very misconstrued and warped phraseology since it first started really kind of…some of the early people who talked about self-esteem and what it was so we’re going to ask you to be patient and stick with us because there’s some very significant things that we’re about to share with you here.

Sterling: Yeah and I just wanted to mention this so that you don’t skip over listening really closely, especially if you’re kind of skeptical about personal development and that kind of thing. And I really wanted to say that I can truly say that the most important thing to online business success and the number one reason I see that people fail to get their online business going is this self-esteem.

So like we said before, like the actual mechanics of online business are relatively easy to learn. It just takes a very specific plan of learning them, but like auto responders or how to set up your website, how to create the right kind of content, etc. But it is really the mindset that makes you actually do these mechanical steps and keep going day in and day out.

And for five years we’ve been focusing on the exact steps or principles or like technical tips or formulas to help get us to the level of success in our online business. And of course since we teach it we want to know every little aspect of it, and you know we actually talk about this a lot since we’re on a mission to teach others how to find freedom with online businesses as well as doing what is needed to further the success we have been working on for years.

I may have really pinpointed the moment this started to change for me and it was when we were talking about perfectionism awhile ago and there was this YouTube video that you found on it and we both watched it. And it’s funny because that video actually started me on a whole bunch of different things including meeting some of my best friends in San Diego when I finally moved down there and really studying happiness and fulfillment and all these other things that we talk about and have finally really grown in our lives so that internet business wasn’t just simply ah, I want to make $500 extra bucks a month.

I mean that’s a great place to start and when that started occurring for me, I was excited about it but there’s a lot of things that we certainly teach in the Academy on how to design your internet business so that you don’t become a slave to it and this kind of thing. But this moment that it really happened was that perfectionist video that again I said led to one of my friends, his name’s Wes, and he’s the one that talked to me about this self-esteem stuff as he studied psychotherapy; that was the thing that he got into.

And I’ve got to say really when he started talking about this, I really had no desire to read about self-esteem and I felt that my self-esteem was fine. And that actually hasn’t changed particularly by reading the book, what I found was that it wasn’t like I had no self-esteem or something and that reading this book made me oh my gosh, now I’ve got all this huge great self-esteem, it was more solidifying the self-esteem I did have and understanding and like it gave me very specific action plans on how to practice having self-esteem and then even being able to look at all the actions I am taking and seeing – is this upping my self-esteem or lowering my self-esteem, which was really interesting.

But I just wanted to mention all this before we get into the meat of it that I was even like, I had no real desire to learn about it at first but again, we found this to be the number one reason why people fail.

Jay: So I guess we should give a definition of what self-esteem is, but let’s start really quickly by saying a couple things that it is not because I’m sure some people in their minds are going oh yeah, self-esteem – in elementary school they start giving us golden stars for this, and that, and the other or there’s lots of different definitions that we have but we’re going to be working with a very specific definition.

So self-esteem is not just like telling ourselves constantly how great we are or those self-affirmations, it’s not false confidence, it’s something much more specific than that. So I’m going to go ahead and let you Sterling talk about the two ingredients which we mentioned briefly but we’re going to go into a little more here, the two ingredients to defining self-esteem for us.

Sterling: Yeah okay, so this definition of self-esteem actually comes from the Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon and the two ingredients…the first ingredient is self-respect which means assurance of my value and affirmative attitude towards my right to live and to be happy, comfort in appropriately assessing my thoughts, wants, and needs, that the feelings of joy and fulfillment are my natural birthright.

And the second one is self-efficacy which means the functioning of my mind and my ability to think, understand, learn, choose, and make decisions, confidence in my ability to understand facts of reality that fall within my sphere of my interests and needs, and then self-trust and self-reliance.

Now those are pretty like you say dense definitions so said another way self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as competent, to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of happiness. So what do you think of that one?

Jay: So self-respect is believing that I have the right to be happy and self-efficacy is having the confidence in my ability to achieve that happiness. And so that’s why we said there’s two ingredients, it’s self-respect and self-efficacy, you deserve to be happy and able to achieve that happiness.

So to understand these let’s talk about what it looks like when self-esteem is not present, when these ingredients are not present. I mean if you’ve ever had like chocolate chip cookies and maybe you forgot to put the salt in, you wouldn’t think that salt is that important but it tastes all wrong. Something like sugar, obviously it’s like oh I want my cookies to be sweet but if the salts not there….self-esteem is kind of like this salt in life and how we view ourselves when it’s not there it completely alters the whole and it actually ends up causing all kinds of problems.

So let’s look at the lack of self-esteem, like for instance the one thing that happens is you’re more likely to give up in the face of challenges if all of a sudden things get a little hard or don’t go as expected, you’re more likely to go oh, it’s just not worth it any more.

Sterling: Yeah and I guess what this could look like is let’s say you’re in the Internet Business Mastery Academy and you’re following the step-by-step instructions and you have it in your mind how long a task is supposed to take. Like let’s say you’re in part five and you’ve got a domain name and you want to start working on the site and you find out that something that’s beyond your control like let’s say that you find that the domain name like takes 24 hours to actually point to your site.

Okay, and in your mind you thought that you were going to get all this stuff done after pointing the domain name. Now this stuff happened to me at the beginning all the time as you’re figuring out how long things take. Now if you realize it’s going to take that time and just things keep happening like that where it just…there’s a couple of things that might take longer than you think and you finally go oh my gosh, this is so time consuming and it’s too hard and then you give up.

And now with the low self-esteem, those types of things are much more likely to happen, that those kinds of challenges that get in your way will get you to quit. And I mean we see this all the time, that this is the case.

Jay: Yeah rather than taking a deep breath going okay, yes this is frustrating but I know I can figure this out, maybe I just need to take a break for a little while, I’ll come back to it. Or maybe I’ll just let it sit for a day and tomorrow I’ll feel renewed and I’ll attack it again. But I do want to get to that goal so I’m going to continue even though things aren’t going the way that I want.

Another thing in the lack of self-esteem is that people would be more likely to accept just the status quo, how things are – not pursue goals or try to become the best they can, just go yeah okay, this is all society expects of me. This is what society has told me is the acceptable thing to do, I’ll just get this job and work my 9 to 5 and that’s all life is and there’s no need to try to have anything more than that.

And never mind the fact that I’m not happy or even to the point of just going yeah, I’m just going to start ignoring that I’m not happy and just squelching those feelings with anything else that I can find around me.

Sterling: Yeah, and this actually occurred to me as kind of a fear of success and a fear of actually being fulfilled. And again, part of the self-esteem of feeling your worthy of happiness, it actually came out as this fear of that.

Jay: Yeah it ties into the fact that if you don’t have full self-esteem then you don’t believe you deserve happiness so there’s this subconscious belief that you deserve unhappiness or we get so used to the struggle it’s like well things have to be hard, that’s how they’re meant to be, or people teach you that that’s how it’s meant to be. So what do you do? You set up your life and you expect things in a way that’s like yeah, it’s supposed to be hard. I’m supposed to be unhappy, I’m not meant to….

And really in the end you don’t respect yourself and you accept less than you actually deserve and then even worse you start letting…not only do you not allow yourself to grow to new places, you allow others to mistreat you as well and place unhappiness upon you. They treat you with a lack of respect as well.

Sterling: Yeah this actually occurred for me when I was around certain family members that would say oh, this internet thing is not real, it’s just a scam, and I was totally crazy to waste my time, and money, and effort to even pursue it. Luckily I was able to fight through that and go no, I think there really is something to it and here we are 100 episodes later and everything that’s happened, I’m just so glad I didn’t listen.

Jay: Yeah I mean I think I’ve probably mentioned the story about the day that I quit, going around and saying to everybody I was leaving and it was very interesting to hear the responses and people trying to wrap their head about what I was about to do because to them it was like that was so out of the normal. And it was like challenging their comfort zone, so some people would give all these excuses to oh yeah, this is why I could never quit being an engineer, or this is why that will never work.

Or they’d be like so wait, so what are you doing, real estate investing? And to their mind they’re trying to put it in a box that they understand and go oh, you mean like a real estate agent? No, no, I’m starting my own…because at the time I was quitting to be a real estate investor. And so what you’re doing sometimes when you try to do something different is you’re poking up against other people’s self-esteem, you’re poking up against their belief of whether or not they deserve to be happy, or their belief of whether they’re able to achieve happiness and so they’re going to try to attack what it is that you’re trying to do.

And so it’s up to you to believe, it’s like no, you know what, I’m going to see that for what it is, they’re on their own path and I’m going to go ahead and just either maybe strive not to be around those voices of descent which is definitely one thing I did or at least see it for what it is and go no, I’m going to continue and not listen to them because this is my path and I do deserve more and I do want more, and I do believe that I can make better things happen.

What this does is you start…if you do listen to the voices of descent, if you have low self-esteem then you’re just going to recoil and seek the safety of the familiar and the undemanding and the irony or the tragedy of all that is that by seeking the familiar and shying away, you actually then weaken your self-esteem more and hence you go towards what is more familiar which might be unhappiness and that weakens the self-esteem more and it ends up in a spiral downward which is absolutely not what we want.

So let’s talk about the happy hopeful side of this now – high self-esteem, what does that look like? Well when you’ve got that healthy sense of yes, I do deserve to be happy and I’m able to achieve that happiness, then we’re more ambitious. And when we do hit the voice of descent, or when things do take longer than we expected, or when something does not…we don’t quite make as much money as we’d hoped on an idea that we had or whatever the case may be.

Or maybe we have to start over on something because we made the wrong choice or not the best choice the first time. When we have high self-esteem, we pick ourselves up after the fall. We learn what we can and we move forward towards just taking the next step forward, towards freedom and happiness.

And you know it’s like I remember over the weekend I mentioned that coaching group that we were at and one of the analogies that was used was the tiny inchworm, if you’ve ever seen the inchworm that pulls itself up a wall or a tree and sometimes it might go up two or three inches and then slide back down an inch or two. Now it still had a net gain of going up an inch but are you the kind of person who focuses on oh my gosh, I just slipped down two inches or are you the person that focuses on no, one inch at a time, I’m going to get up this thing because the yummy leaves I want to eat are at the top or the better view is at the top of this tree I’m trying to inch up, and high self-esteem would push us towards the latter.

Sterling: Yeah and for me I actually finally got to the point where any sort of thing that looked like a failure I just took it as a lesson and tried to learn from it as fast as I could and tried to just not make that mistake again and press forward.

Jay: Another thing when we do have that high self-esteem is that we’re more willing to express our true self more fully and more confidently. I mean the low self-esteem person, let’s say when you are around the family going yeah, that internet business stuff, that won’t work. Or yeah, you know 8 out of 10 businesses all fail right? And you’re like yeah I know and you end up just kind of like capitulating and agreeing with them even if maybe in your mind you’re going no, that’s not necessarily true…

Sterling: …or if 8 out of 10 fail, I’ll be one of the two would…

Jay: Right, what’s your response to that? Either yeah, you might be right or was your response going no, I’m going to go for it and I’m going to be the two. So you’re able to express who you are rather than kind of shying back in order to not rock the boat of other people. But really the thing that happens then is we start forming more nourishing relationships, we start finding…

I mean I can remember the point where I went to that first real estate investor’s association and found other people who had similar hopes and dreams and I guess self-esteem, I guess they wanted something different. They weren’t going to just accept and I was like wow, this is so cool. This is so refreshing, this is unlike all those other people at work who are going oh that will never work, these are people who were encouraging each other.

And so I started forming more nourishing and reaching out for more nourishing relationships rather than just accepting relationships that might even be toxic not only to myself self-esteem but then to my happiness and holding me back, because in the end that voice of descent just wants to undermine your foundation until everything crumbles down on top of you.

Sterling: Yeah I think that for me one of the big ones was when actually you and I met and I finally found…I think you maybe were the first person I ever met live that was into or interested in information marketing and possibly doing it on the internet. And that’s why it kind of went really fast with us being friends and doing a show and all this other stuff because it was like oh finally a nourishing relationship where the person understands it, has the same hopes, you know what I mean, another person with the self-esteem that can make things happen.

Jay: Well and when you’re in a space like that you’re more prone to be honest in your communications with people around you, about what you really want and stick up for what you need, and strive for what you need, and more honestly with others as well as just being more honest with yourself about what you really want rather than just telling yourself oh yeah, you know what, I don’t really want to have more freedom, I don’t want to really want to live.

Living in New York City might be cool but I’ll just accept where my family wants me to stay because that’s the safe…or are you going to be honest with yourself about what you want and the situation, to be honest with others about saying you know what, I love you family but what I really want to do is I want to live in New York City and pursue this other thing or whatever the case may be. So that just sounds like in the end to me a higher level of freedom, more healthy and true relationships, and then actually rather than shying back from your purpose you’re going to make a go for it and strive for it.

Sterling: Well and you know one of the things that we talk about in the Academy is about fulfillment factors and definite major purpose, and the freedom to truly express yourself with an online business to help boost this self-esteem to express your self-esteem.

Jay: Yeah it’s in our tag line on our site, it’s ‘turn your life’s passion into a profitable internet business.’ It’s who are you, what do you really want to do, who do you want to work…do you want…are you extremely passionate and skilled with your hands at making cool crafty things? Do you want to reach out and help other people do the same thing and maybe have a scrapbooking site that not only makes you lots of money, but helps you develop the skills you’re good at and reach out and help other people who are similar.

So yeah exactly, that’s why it’s so crucial in the beginning of the Academy is let’s figure out what is it that you really want so that you can go and fully express that in your life and find that freedom and happiness. And the other thing that with high self-esteem to finish up the high self-esteem stuff is that you would seek the challenge and the stimulation of worthwhile and even sometimes demanding goals. It just goes back to rather than shying back you’re going to seek the challenge of those things because you know that when you do challenge yourself, when you do step out, that’s when your self-esteem is strengthened and you find increased freedom, you make more money, you’re more fulfilled, you find better relationships.

Yes it was a challenge for a little while but it’s like a muscle, you’ve got to go and exercise the thing so that it gets bigger. And self-esteem’s the exact same thing, happiness is the exact same thing, healthy relationships are the exact same thing. You’ve got to exercise these things; you can sit on the couch and let them atrophy. Right now I’ve got this knee injury that I mentioned in the last episode and I was showing you Sterling, it was like look at my calf and my two legs.

And you could see it, how on my right leg the muscles are starting even in just a couple weeks, starting to lose muscle mass and my leg’s just looking a little more floppy because I’ve had to stay off of it and let it heal. And of course it’s appropriate for me to do that right now but if I were to do that too long, what’s going to happen is my muscles are just going to completely lose their strength, lose their flexibility, and I’m going to lose my ability to walk well with that leg.

And it’s the exact same thing with self-esteem. I mean soon enough I need to start seeking ways to exercise this leg, maybe start swimming with it a little bit and then eventually walk on it more. And it might be challenging and slow and frustrating because it takes me longer to get somewhere and I can’t move the way I used to be. But in the end I’m going to have a strong and healthy leg that will allow me to then achieve bigger and better things and maybe climb a mountain again eventually or do whatever it is that I enjoy most and want to do with this leg right now.

Sterling: Yeah and I think the one last thing I want to say about the high self-esteem that I really, really like and we try and infuse this into Internet Business Mastery is the having an expectation of success as a result of like who we are and what we do. So like again, our tag line very much presupposes this – ‘escape the 9 to 5 and live the lifestyle of your dreams by transforming your life’s passion into a extremely profitable internet business.’ That’s all about the expectation of success. The way that’s written, it’s finding your fulfillment, being able to have a mission for helping other people and being able to profit from it.

Jay: So we’ve been talking a little bit abstractly, I mean we’ve been trying to give some examples and things but we’re talking okay, here’s what self-esteem is, this is kind of what low self-esteem looks like, this is what high self-esteem looks like. Let’s try to make this is a little more concrete with some conclusions. And this is definitely one conclusion that I think you can draw from self-esteem both in the studies that we’ve done as well as trying to apply this principle in our own life or just in looking at some of these examples that we’ve been giving here in this episode. And that is this, the level of your self-esteem influences how you act and how you act influences your self-esteem.

Sterling: Yeah I think of it as literally every action I take is either raising or lowering my self-esteem so I try to stay really, really conscious of every single action. At first you think of it more and then I think once I consciously raise it more, then I unconsciously do high self-esteem actions if that makes sense. So it’s like taking those actions to raise self-esteem actually perpetuates itself to become unconscious as well.

Jay: Yeah it is a strange chicken or egg thing because it’s like well if I have low self-esteem I’m going to be predisposed to act in a low self-esteem way and so at some point I’ve got to start taking those actions that are indicative of high self-esteem so that then it will start raising…so to put it another way self-esteem is like this involuntary response to our actions.

Just like our bodies, if we eat really high fat content stuff all the time and we don’t exercise and we don’t watch…if we put potato chips in our body all the time, what’s going to happen? Well you’re going to lose muscle mass, you’re going to gain weight, you’re going to lose energy and there’s nothing we can do to control that, that’s science, that’s biology, that’s the way our bodies work, that’s involuntary response to the diet and the exercise that we give to our body.

On the other hand if we try to eat a balanced diet and balance the fat and the protein and the carbohydrates that we eat and try to get the produce that we’re supposed to have, the fruits and vegetables, the different things – well then the involuntary response of our body is to gain muscle mass to feel more vibrant, to lose weight, to feel more trim, to be more energetic and have the ability to go and do the things in life that we want to do and hopefully to live longer and be able to do the things we want in life longer because we’ve treated our body in that way.

And self-esteem is the exact same thing, by taking certain actions even though the weight thing we can take a measuring tape and put it around our stomach and put around our arms and measure our muscles…

Sterling: Don’t remind me.

Jay: We could step on the scale and we can see the results of the going up and down whereas it’s a little trickier, it definitely takes…there’s not like a self-esteem scale we can step on and have it go your self-esteem today is 9 or whatever. It is something that you do start to sense more and more but it’s not as concrete to measure it but it works in the exact same way.

The actions you take will directly impact your self-esteem, and the self-esteem that you have will directly impact the type of actions that you take in your life. And the actions that you take in your life as we now to draw back to last episode, are what lead to greater fulfillment of purpose, more meaningful relationships in our life, more freedom to do what we want, live where we want, enjoy life in the way that we want, exercise our will in the way we want.

And when we do that we’ll reach the ultimate goal which I think we all have which  is happiness. So if you want to look at it like a road map, we’ve been drawing out here last episode we kind of projected you all the way to the destination – happiness. And said okay, well what’s right before happiness? Well it’s those healthy relationships, those meaningful purposes in life and enjoying freedom.

And now we’re coming all the way back to the destination and going okay, well what’s like the first step and what’s going to pave the roadway all the way through for you? And what’s going to when you start running out of gas give you the more gas and fuel that you need and when you hit a detour in the road help you get around it. And it’s self-esteem, that’s what’s going to build bridges over the gaps that you run into along the way.

Self-esteem, it’s the first step, it’s the beginning, it’s the thing that’s going to propel you and pave the way all the way to the end. And so this is why we talk about taking action so much because really it comes down to the actions that we take.

Sterling: And I just wanted to make a quick correction to what you said, you said the destination is self-esteem but I think you actually meant the start of the journey is self-esteem whereas….right?

Jay: Yeah the destination is happiness.

Sterling: Yeah and so the start of the journey is the self-esteem but I also wanted to mention that one of the things we’re really big on thinking is yeah, if you take an action and you get a successful result, you raise your self-esteem. If you take an action and don’t get the result you want but you learn from it and move to the next action, you also raise your self-esteem because you raise your self-efficacy.

And I just wanted to mention that so this is kind of that way of not thinking about failure in the same way. If you don’t get the result you want you just mark that down as oops, that thing doesn’t work and you just keep going and that still raises your self-esteem.

Jay: So let’s bottom line it here, your ability to achieve success and happiness in your business, to achieve the level of income that you want, to achieve the level of freedom that you want, whatever it is that you want not only in your business but in life, and we define that happiness and success as freedom, purpose, and healthy relationships.

These things will be directly impacted by your level of self-esteem, and so that is where this secret sauce comes in. And why I liked Sterling’s answer back in the chit chat in the beginning of what flavor is the secret sauce, well it kind of depends person to person but there are some truths of this is just what we have seen not only in our lives but the lives of others.

But of course in the end the steps that you take, the kind of freedom you want, the kind of purpose you want, the kind of relationships you want are going to depend on you. But the thing that is consistent across the board that it requires taking consistent action that is congruent with the type of freedom you want, the type of purpose you want, the type of relationships you want, the type of happiness you want. Take actions congruent with those things; that is the secret sauce to success.

If there is one, this is absolutely it and we believe that you deserve that happiness, and we have confidence in your ability to achieve it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, a hundred episodes into this thing. Yes we are here making…this is a business and it makes us money, it helps us have our freedom and purpose and to do the things we love and associate with the kinds of people including you that we like to help in our lives.
But we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have hope that this would be able to help the people that listen as well. So now the big question is do you believe it for yourself? Do you believe that you deserve it and that you have the ability to reach it for yourself?

So here are a couple action points that you can take right now. We mentioned in recent episodes, the Six Pillars of Self-Esteem as one of our Quick Tips and that goes much, much more into depth on these principles and breaks it down obviously into six pillars and gives some very powerful and specific actions you can start taking to build self-esteem in your life and then to apply this towards greater success.

And then just remember take actions daily, hourly, monthly, quarterly, all the time. Take actions that are consistent with what you want most in life, and when you do, your self-esteem and hence your happiness will increase. And next thing you know you’ll be quitting your job, you’ll be making more money, you’ll be traveling more, you’ll be spending more time with your family and whatever it is that you want most and you think that you deserve.

So whatever you do, just do not underestimate your ability to achieve thing things that you want most in your life.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip….

Jay: Alright, we’ve got a Quick Tip for you. This Quick Tip comes from a recent experience I had and in fact originally I learned this from Matt Mickiewicz…he has this crazy name, but he’s one of the founders of 99Designs that we’ve talked about quite a bit in the past.

And so let me back up, it was a few days ago. I was meeting with a non-profit here that I’ve mentioned before, Polaris, a dance company, the one that I did my documentary about. And I’m helping them with their new website and they were kind of telling me the goals of what they wanted and we were kind of finding the right balance of what I could help them with, what would be good for marketing but still meets some of the things that they wanted.

And so it got down to okay, next step and what should we do? And I said what I need you to do is I need you to draw up a mock up or what’s sometimes called a wire frame of what this thing needs to look like. I told them even though one of the directors is good at graphic design I said look, you don’t need to be doing the web work, you’ve got a lot of other things to do. Let’s have you concentrate on what you’re best at.

I know people that can do the web work for you, but what I do need to know if kind of in general terms what you would like the layout to look like so that you’re happy with it. And they said well is there a good tool to do that with, I mean they could go into Photoshop but not everybody has Photoshop if they wanted something quick and really easy.

Sterling: Well and I remember how we mocked up ours, it was a lot of work.

Jay: Yeah, it was splicing and pasting. So anyway, there’s this online service and it’s free called GoMockingBird.com and their tagline is ‘wire frames on the fly.’ And if you go there they’ve got a little video showing you how it works. But basically it’s just drag and drop and really easily like okay, it needs to be a search box here and there needs to be this box over here and a video here, and bam, bam, bam, bam.

So if you’re not a designer, if you’re not a techie person but you want to have input obviously on what your site’s going to look like because you’re the one who knows the purpose of your business the best and not all designers and in fact most designers, the large…well I don’t want to offend anybody but a lot of designers out there don’t know anything about marketing.

So you definitely want to give them direction from that end and let them do what they’re good at which is making it look nice – GoMockingBird.com is definitely a great resource to very quickly and easily, and even have a little fun with it, put together a mockup or wire frame of your site and then you can just take that and give them access, or send it over to your designer to look at and have them work from there.

And so in the end you’re going to end up with something that’s a lot closer to what you want, it’s going to save you money, it’s going to save them time and get to the goal faster.

Sterling: Now if you’d like dozens of other resources such as this one, you can find them in the Internet Business Mastery Academy, along with video tutorials showing you exactly how we use them. To get a 30-day no risk trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy, visit freeaudiogift.com. That’s it for this episode of Internet Business Mastery, until next time we wish you ultimate success in your internet business.

You’ve been listening to the iconoclasts of the 9 to 5, and the purveyors of freedom and fulfillment – Sterling and Jay. Sterling and Jay invite you to discover one of their most popular audio programs ever – The 3 Pillars of Designing Your Ultimate Internet Lifestyle. Visit freeaudiogift.com now and sign up for the free weekly Internet Business Mastery email newsletter and you’ll get instant access to this life changing audio presentation pulled directly from the content of the acclaimed Internet Business Mastery Academy membership community. Go now to freeaudiogift.com. Internet Business Mastery – free your mind!