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From Difficult Challenges to Multiple Successes

by Matthew Pollard
by Matthew Pollard | 
1 min read
 | Sep 26, 2014
  1. Home
  2. Rapid Growth
  3. From Difficult Challenges to Multiple Successes

In this interview with K Wave 6 Radio, I discuss my story with Kirk Spencer: The obstacles I faced on the road to success and how I overcame them to get where I am today.

Table of Contents

These are some of my most personal stories. I hope the secrets I found along the way help you as much as they did me.

If you found my story helpful, please share what story was the most engaging to you. Please let me know in the comments section below:

 

 

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About Matthew Pollard

About Matthew Pollard
Called the real deal by Forbes, Matthew is a small business advocate, introvert champion, Rapid Growth® Coach, and keynote speaker. Responsible for five multimillion-dollar success stories before the age of 30, today Matthew is an internationally recognized sales and networking expert, author of the bestselling Introvert’s Edge series, and host of two top-ranked podcasts. His work has transformed over 3500 struggling businesses to date.

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Host: Hello, welcome to K WAVe 6 Radio. Today my guest is Matthew Pollard. Now here’s a gentleman that I’m going to let really run with the show. Reason being, as soon as you hear all that he has done and is doing – you’re going to say, “How in the world does this guy live 24 hours a day and still get sleep?” Matthew, welcome to the show and tell us more.

 

Matt: G’day mate, how are you? And thanks for that lovely introduction.

 

Host: Well thank you for being here. I think if nothing else, for our listeners, I think we already started to become very good friends, and probably going to be lifelong friends. So actually this is going to be fun.

 

Matt: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

 

Host: So am I. Anyway, Matthew go ahead. Tell us where you got started? Because you told me a very interesting story about actually how you got started in all of this. In school I believe it was?

 

Matt: I could probably even go back further than that – where my father will tell you that I started in sales and marketing when I picked up a leaf in autumn time, and said, “This is a really interesting leaf. I bet you there’d be a market for this.” I grew up in a relatively medium to lower class community, and I wanted to get a computer for my own bedroom. I would have been in probably grade 5, grade 6 at the time. And I noticed when I was looking in computer parts and prices, that I couldn’t afford any of them, firstly. But secondly, I noticed that there were big discrepancies in the prices between one shop and another shop. So what I did, was started calling all of the cheaper shops and saying, “If I bought in bulk, would you give me a discount?” and finding out that they could.

 

Then I would call all of the expensive shops, and saying, “I’m just interested. Could you do these prices at all? Because I can get them from somewhere else for that.” Well they said, “We can’t even buy them for that price.” And I went, “Uh huh, I’ve got a market here for people that can’t buy cheap parts, to get those cheap parts to them.” So I started distributing between cheap shops to more expensive shops. And as a result, I just got then to collect the savings that they had made, and within a few weeks I had my first computer.

 

Host: And how old were you?

 

Matt: I would have been about 11 or 12. I got a reference letter for that, to get my first job at McDonald’s. Would have been about $9 an hour, when I was making more in computer parts back then. I did it for a few months, but again my interest was never in money. My interest was always in creating something that hadn’t been done before. So after I achieved my computer parts business, and got the computer that I’d set out to achieve– Halfway through that process, I got distributors calling – and I started to get the prices even cheaper, by going directly to the distributors. Funnily enough, the cheap computer stores – the people that worked there got sick of me just coming in and picking up parts, and actually told me the name of their distributors. So I just started doing that. And then as a result of doing that, when I got my computer – I then passed on those distributors’ names to the people that got expensive parts. So, I got a win – I got the computer that I always dreamed of. Which was several thousand dollars. And if you – going back 20 years now, that’s a lot of money.

 

Host: Yeah.

 

Matt: And secondly, I then allowed the computer parts stores to then have – obviously an advantage over everybody else, as a result of helping me out. From even then, I had the ability to market. I was always interested in business. One of the things that made me different I guess, is I just looked for a different way. A little bit outside the box on how to get things. I didn’t focus on the fact that I didn’t have money. I focused on what I could do to get money. And that brought me to my second business which was in high school. Where our accounting class had a business venture where, basically what we had to do was open up a business each. And as a result of opening up that business, we had to turn a profit. The goal was to either turn a profit or turn a loss. But because it was an accounting class, we were supposed to document the profit or the loss. That was the sole purpose, to prove that we could run accounting for a small business.

 

Marketing

 

Now, the way it generally worked is, they gave you $50, and you invested that $50. And some people made a profit, some people made a loss. All in all, they balanced it out, and had to give the $50 back if you made a $50 profit. Anything above that you could keep. And if you lost the $50, you didn’t have any risk. So, that was fine, except I decided that, “How could I do this without spending any money?” So I was working at McDonald’s, and I realized that where I went to school was miles from a McDonald’s. And 95% of the people in our school didn’t have cars. Because in Australia you can’t drive until you’re 18, which is the last year of high school. And most people, even in the last year of high school, don’t get their license on average until about June.
So what I did is, I ran a McDonald’s drive. And I collected money, and I then went out and picked up McDonald’s. And my family will still laugh about the fact that I spent all night counting money that I’d collected, because we did such a great marketing promotion. We collected several thousand dollars. And we profited, to give you an understanding, we profited over two and a half thousand dollars, just on that venture. And I would have spent less than 50 minutes setting up the entire business. So, as a result of that, obviously I did very well. The school was very upset because apparently I wasn’t supposed to make that much money. And they had no idea what to do with a student that made such considerable amounts of money – because it’s a positive. However, I made that money by making money off other students. So it wasn’t within the boundaries of what you could do. Because obviously I thought outside of the square, and when somebody said you could make a profit or a loss – I chose to make a profit. And I chose to make as big a profit as possible. I ran all the books–

 

Host: You found yourself a market, and you just went for it.
Matt: Exactly. That worked really well, and when you talk about repeat business, I provided a service in a niche that had no other competitors. And as a result, I made a huge amount of money. And I did it, and I got calls for doing it every single week. And if the school had have let me, I would have had a business at the age of 18, where I probably would have made over $150,000 in profit. So, I guess that’s where I got started.
Host: Oh people, I told you this guy. It is, just listening to you it’s just always a constant smile on my face. Hearing how you did all this kind of stuff. But what you’re telling me, and what I’ve heard you say more than once. And I would like for you if you can, at least at this moment – to bring out the emphasis about, “It’s never really been about money. It’s about doing something that hasn’t been done before.”

 

Matt: So, I have this general belief that if you do things for money, if you make money, you’re going to be happy. If you don’t make money, you’re going to be unhappy. The funny thing about business is that you have a virtual Everest to climb before you start making a cent. Then you start making lots and lots of money. So purely, if your value set is around money, while you’re climbing up Mt. Everest, you’re not happy. You’re not motivated, because you’re not seeing returns. You learn things about internal and external motivators. If your motivators are purely external, ie. you like making money, you like fast cars, you want to have the nice house in the nice area – and for that you need money. That’s not going to serve you well. You want to be in control of your motivation. And to be in control of your motivation, you need to find your inner “Why?”. And for me, my inner “Why?” was I love to create things that have never been created before. See, I grew up through school as a dyslexic child, and everybody told me that as a result of that – I needed to set my goals at a very low level, because I was never going to achieve much. I remember in primary school, I said I was going to be a doctor or a lawyer. And they said, “Maybe you should look at being a police officer? That’s more a safe goal for you.”
And as a result, I just decided that I was going to create things that people hadn’t thought of. And I was going to do things that most people, A wouldn’t have the confidence to do. And B, wouldn’t have the foresight to do. And I went about doing that. And that’s where my internal motivator came, to create things that hadn’t been done before. See, my last business that I was heavily involved in, was a school. And, you would safely assume that in education, everything that could have been thought of, has been thought of.  Because you’ve got some educated and very smart people, that perhaps in (8:54?) work out differences (8:55?) and how to market their business on (8:59?). You will also see that that market’s saturated. Yet my last business involvement there created a business that included 3 and a half thousand enrolees, in 3 years – and the fastest-growing school, which is your equivalent of a college. In Australia, it’s what’s called an RTO. In the country, just because – finding a niche that no one else had thought of. Just doing something that no one else had done. So the philosophy that I live on. Is the idea that, if you can create something that hasn’t been done before, that is something that I can be internally proud of – and internally happy about, whether it makes money or not. What I found though, is by doing that, it makes money, because no one else has done it.

 

Business

 

Host: Let me ask you question, because we’re going to go into a break here fairly soon. But I want people to understand something about you. First of all, you’re not what we would call an “old person,” or even an “older person” And, through all that you have done, and with your age, with your experience, how many business–? First, what is your age, and then how many businesses, and how much in your adult life have you earned from these businesses? So, in other words – people, what I’m trying to do is set up a point where you can listen to him and go, “He’s done all this at that age? I want to listen to him more.” Which is definitely what he’s here for. So if you don’t mind, Matthew?

 

Matt: Sure, sure – I can do that. The first thing I should say is, I just turned 30. I spent all of last year travelling to work out where I was going to set up my new businesses, which is why I’m now located in Austin, Texas. However, what I frequently find is when people hear that I’m 30, they’re like, “Well how could you possibly know enough about business to be able to give me advice?” A lot of people that I used to teach in the last school that I ran, they were 20, 30 years in business. What gives me the right to be able to tell them? And the answer is, I have been doing things differently, and trying new things since I was 18.

 

There’s a friend of mine, Thom Singer – he’s a speaker that earns a considerable amount of money out of public speaking. He’s known as a networking catalyst. He public speaks day to day. And when I tell him what I’ve done, he said, “So you must have started when you were like 12?” And it’s funny, because I guess my first computer business was when I was 12. But there was a substantial break between that and when I was 18. And then from when I turned 19 and really got into things. However, I started my first business when I was 19. And that grew to a 4.2 million dollar turnover every year, with nearly 2 and a half million in the first year, almost 3 and a half million in the second year – and 4.2 million in the third year. That’ll give you some understanding of what I’m talking about.
Another business that I was heavily involved with was the school, as I spoke about. That business was a 3 million dollar business within 12 months. And it turned over that consecutively over a 3 year period. One of the other businesses I was involved in – it was a 16 month contract, with an 18 million dollar deliverable, as in turnover within 16 months. I’ve business coached a predominant amount of people from small business, from medium business, from large businesses, from corporates – and helped them turn over huge amounts of money.

 

Even one business that I can speak of is a ghost writer, and there’s a testimonial of him on my website. You will see on the testimonial, he hadn’t made an income in nearly 6 months. He hadn’t had a sale, not a single sale. His business just wasn’t working. And he was looking into going into working for a living – because if you’re not making money, how can you possibly run your own business? It just doesn’t work. And within 2 weeks, which was 2 phone calls of talking to me, he had made an income of $40 000. 2 weeks. Within seven weeks, he was at $80 000 worth of income.

 

This is the difference of working with a different mindset. And the strategies that I taught him were very simple. I looked at his website, and I went, “Now, now, none of that’s going to work. Let’s change, let’s pull this out, let’s do this. And let’s do this, and let’s move forward.” Now this is a guy that is a professional ghost writer, and he writes business books for people for a living. So he’s had huge amounts of advice on how to do everything. I just do things differently. And what I focus on is high level of outcomes, with short levels of output. He didn’t need to go about recreating his entire business. He just created minute changes to his website that got more emails in.

 

I taught him how to convert those emails into phone calls, and then how to convert those phone calls into sales. And every time he picked up the phone and called somebody, it resulted in a sale – just by teaching him seven simple milestones to how to handle that. I guess when you say to me, “What sort of income have you achieved?” I’ve achieved substantial income for myself. However, I have also done it for a large number of people. And the reason why I’m saying that is a lot of people say to me, “Matt, you’re just a freak. You just create businesses out of anything. As a result, no one can match what you do.” And the reason why I say that’s not true is because I map that exact same success directly into other peoples’ businesses too. So it’s the skill set that I have that works, it’s not me.

 

Host: Indeed. Matthew, please continue.

Matt: I think I should probably classify that money can be an end goal, to anything you try to achieve. And it should be, don’t get me wrong. I see a lot of people that run their own businesses on a day to day basis, and when you ask them how much money they make, they say, “Well, I pay my staff this. My expenses are this. And afterwards, I take home about this much.” And they could earn more working at Chuck E. Cheese. So, I have to say, your motivator shouldn’t be money. However, if you’re in a business that isn’t making money – you either need to enact change, and get out of that day to day rut (15:14?) or move on.

 

And the reason why I say that is, I constantly get, “I don’t have time to go out and find new customers. I don’t have time to improve my processes. And I’m still not making the amount of money that I need to.” Well the answer is, if you’re not thinking like a business owner – and that’s what those statements imply. Move on and go and work somebody that does. However, if you will think like a business owner, and you will work on the basis that you can continually improve your business to achieve an outcome – that will be both profitable, and something you get purely intrinsic motivation out of. Then that is alignment that you want, and we should start to head in that direction.

 

What I find is that people generally say, “Okay good. So I need to be money focused at the start?” No. you need to be intrinsically motivated first. You need to be intrinsically motivated to achieve something, a specific goal. And then money can be a byproduct of that. It’s (16:18?) one before the other. If you’re money focused, what will generally happen is you’ll focus on money. That seems quite logical. When you focus on money, and you need to invest in your business – the first thing you do is you start looking at how you can cut costs. Obviously as a business owner myself, I need to be continually focused on how I spend my money. However, when I know I need to do a task, I never cut professionalism or quality for money. And if you’re money focused, you tend to do that. You also tend to stop looking outside the box for things you could do to improve your business.

 

So what I tend to suggest to people is, “You need to have it, where you have an internal motivator.” For instance, I just completed a video series with a person in Australia Daniele Lima. He’s almost a best-selling author now. I spent last year traveling and developing new content. I made a decision that I was going to move to Austin, Texas. And we had been talking about working together for years. And we’d worked together on a couple of sales projects, and we’d done a lot of work with the AFL – which is your equivalent to the NFL. And acquired them as customers for one of the last companies that I worked for.

 

However, we always wanted to do a seminar series. I knew I was going to be back for a month. When I decided I was coming back, I sent Daniele an email. I said, “We have one month to put a project together, would you like to do a video series with me?” The answer was, “Of course.” So we got together and we put the content together, and we put ourselves in a green screen room. And the product that we created was fantastic. It talks about niche marketing, which is one of the things I absolutely specialize in. Because so many people have this vanilla approach to doing a business. “I want to start dry cleaner, I’m going to build a dry cleaning agency – just like everybody else. I want to open up a pizza shop. So I’m going to open it up – exactly the same as everyone else, with the same price tag.” These strategies don’t work. So I focus on niche marketing.

 

And then the other part of it is sales systemization. Because once you have customers coming in, you want to systemize the sales approach. But going back to what we created. We put ourselves in a green screen room, we didn’t do a home job. It wasn’t hugely expensive, it was slightly more expensive. We had a person behind the camera that gave us feedback on how to do things. Now what is interesting is – I have done home recording green screens before, and I have done this. And I can put the 2 next to each other, and you can see boundless differences.

 

Now for the sake of a few hundred dollars – which is all the difference in the price of buying the equipment and doing it myself. Or utilizing this facility, say it was $1000, ’cause I think that’s what it actually was. I saved that money in editing, because I wasn’t spending as much time. I got a professional editor to do it, and they could then make sure that worked a lot quicker and easier. The product quality is now sellable for a higher price tag. Now if I had have been completely money focused, the quality wouldn’t have been as good, and now I wouldn’t be making as much money off the back end.

 

Again, it started from a passion. I really wanted to work with Daniele. I really wanted to create a content that was all about marketing and sales. And we were passionate about creating something that was completely different to everything else. ie. Most people talk about marketing, not niche marketing. Or if they do talk about niche marketing, they certainly don’t talk to you about what you do when you have customers calling. Because they may be marketers, they’re not salespeople. Or the salespeople aren’t marketers. And that’s what made this product of danandmatt.com so strong. That was the passion. The passion was behind. We wanted to create something new and different that hadn’t been done before. However, we are now making money off the product – a lot more than we possibly ever could of if we just got together to make a vanilla course like everybody else’s, because that’s what makes money.

 

Host: Matthew, I’m listening to you speak and I’m going to ask you something very impromptu – and you have every right to say this as a “no.” But I’d like to have you back on our show again in the future. But, for those who would rather listen to you speak, instead of going through directly to you. Besides the fact I know you travel a lot, and this would give people the opportunity to listen to you more. How about we have you back and we have you answer questions from our listeners, if we get any people – anyone that wants to ask you questions. They can send the email to me at the radio station, and I’ll feed them over to you for our next show, what do you think?

 

Matt: Look, I’d love to do that. I think to do that though we should set some boundaries, just so that I can be as effective at helping people as possible. What I love is to get businesses off the ground. I love getting businesses out of that stale day to day trading that they perhaps have done for the last 20 years. I like to create exceptional growth. And I think if we focus on that – and there’s a lot of things we can focus on. But if we focus specifically on creating real change, then we can really hone in and help those people in a more effective way. If we get questions perhaps on a different topic, more related to long term trading and that sort of thing – we could perhaps do that even as a third session? I just really want to work, and what I love working with is people that have an idea and want to get started marketing. And perhaps have built a product, and they need to get it off the ground. Or have been doing something for 20 years and they’re like, “There’s got to be more to this. What can I do to grow my business?”

 

So if we were going to focus in that, perhaps questions around, “How would I market, how would I find my niche?” And we can get into some specific examples, if that helps? We could look at perhaps how you would handle a sales process. And we can go into detail perhaps on what kind of questions you could ask as one of the stages of the sales process. Because people don’t spend anywhere near enough time understanding the customer before they start selling a product. And that predominantly comes from a lack of understanding of a sales process – or lack of sales system. So we could definitely focus on that. Perhaps we could also focus on some time management even? On how you would find time to utilize the information that I’m going to be giving you.

 

Host: Okay so, how do you find your niche, sales and time management?

 

Matt: So we can definitely focus on that. Now I’m going to leave that up to you. If you get a bunch of questions in a different topic, I’m more than happy to treat that segment. I’m just offering a little bit of an option for people out there that really want to drive their businesses forward, or drive their businesses from startup to success. Get some real key points to really start to achieve success quickly.

 

Host: Alright, you heard it from the man. If you have questions about how to find your niche, sales and time management – send your questions right here to info@kwave6radio.tk. Once again, that is info@kwave6radio.tk. If you missed that, you can always go to our website, and you can find that right on our contacts page. And you can actually fill in the form and send it directly through there. Or just send it in through your own email. Take your choice. Anyway Matthew, why don’t you continue on from where you just left off?

 

Sales
Matt: Perhaps it’s important to mention, to help people frame some of the questions that they ask for perhaps your next topic. And that is that people quite frequently assume that sales is an art form, you either have it or you don’t. And I just want to give people the opportunity – well to understand that that’s not the case. See for me, I was an introverted kid. Dyslexic, so didn’t really understand much. Didn’t have a lot of wealth of knowledge in regards to reading, because I didn’t read. And I had to find a way to become a salesperson. And I sucked at the start. I – 93 doors I think I knocked on before I made my first sale.

 

What I learned, and I learned this from watching huge amounts of YouTube videos. And now I would use things like podcasts as well. To understand the strategies that you can use in sales. Which we’ll cover off on next session. The one thing I want to postulate for people is that most people have a university degree or a college qualification. And when they first started, their first day – I want them to think back. Were they as competent at their chosen profession as what they are now? And the answer is always going to be “no.” If you went to a neuro surgeon and they said, “Look you’re my first brain surgery, and I have never been to university–”

 

Host: Yeah.

 

Matt: “However, I’m going to chop your head up – and I’m sure we’ll get some success.” Would you want to use them? Of course not. Yet people look at that same thought process for sales and go, “Oh that’s something I’ll just pick up.” And it’s become a misconception. My belief is because there is no university qualification or college degree you can get in sales. However, it is a series of processes and steps and a learnable skill – just like everything else. And so is marketing, so is niche marketing. All of these strategies where people say, “Oh throw my hands up – I can’t learn it.” Is just because they haven’t allocated the time to first learn the concepts, practice the concepts, and become experts in those concepts.
When you look at sales and marketing, I want you to look at how much time you’ve spent utilizing, learning and applying these concepts – compared to your practical skill that you have for your profession. If the amount of time is nowhere near, then you need to look at starting to spend time learning those strategies. And if you learn those strategies, you will find it takes nowhere near as much time as your practical skill – but still takes time. And there’s some lovely videos on danandmatt.com/free. That will take you through the basics of segmentation, and the 7 step sales process. So that perhaps when you watch those, you can then come back with more specific questions that could help you.
Host: Indeed. I have a question for Matthew. And it’s something that even I teach, even in my classes – especially down here. The expression is, “Is learning how to think, versus what to think.” Because Matthew was talking about people that have gone to school. They have higher education. But higher– Well education – period, generally teaches you what to think. And I’ll give you a quick example of this. And I’m trying to make it very short. Is that I had a friend a number of years ago – about 20, 25 years ago. He studied to be a brain surgeon. And he says what was wonderful about him – at least he thought so at that time was. He has a photographic memory. And he says, “I could read a book and I could – it doesn’t matter what kind of book it was. Textbook, whatever.

 

And I could tell you what page, what paragraph, what sentence, what pictures were on that page. It was fine.” He says– He got into graduate school, he was doing brain surgery. And he was doing something in the surgery, and he came to the realization that if it was covered in the book, he could do it. If it was something that was outside of what he had learned, he did not have the ability to reason his way through the problem. And that’s when he says, “It’s more important for this person to have a better surgeon than it is for me just to be a doctor.” So he left and became something else. So this is kind of like what you were talking about, finding your niche. But also, how do you see learning how to think, versus what to think. What is your opinion on that?

 

Matt: The first thing I can say is, anybody that asks me, “Tell me what to think?” The first thing that occurs to me is they don’t know how to think. I can use a couple of different concepts to help explain this. So the first one can be – in neuro linguistic programming, they talk about the fact that our brain can only process – I think it’s 128 or 136, depending on which study and what year you look at the data – pieces of information at any second. We are presented, however, with 2 million bits of information every second. Through our numerous different sensors. Now what happens is our brain looks at that 2 million pieces of information, deletes, distorts and generalizes that information through our beliefs, our values. And then from that, works out what it actually sees hears, and smells. And what our experience is from that.

 

Now the best way I can explain this, and there’s a fellow called Tad James, who is – NLP teacher that I studied under. And he talks about the fact that If you could imagine being handed 2 million toothpicks every second. Having to work, throw out all but 128 or 136 of them every second – to decide which toothpicks you have. And those toothpicks decide how you view the world. And the way you make those decisions is through the fact that you delete, distort and generalize through your own experiences, values and beliefs. Then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that everybody has a different perception of the world.

 

So how you think, rather than what you think is determined by the way you control your mindset. The most important thing is to realize that there are numerous perspectives for how you can view everything. If you decide something’s going to fail, it may luckily not fail. Generally it will. If you decide, in your head, that something will succeed. Sometimes it will fail, but more often than not, you are going to have a higher chance of it succeeding. So when you look at whether or not you choose to think what everyone else tells you – or take a step back, and decide based on the specific experience that you’re having right now, how you’re going to view that in your own mindset. And choose how you think for that specific event – defines the success you will have in this world.

 

That’s the first way I guess I can explain the – how you think versus what you think. A lot of people also focus on – they need to have structures that they live by. A matrix, a box if you like that they put themselves in. And that’s purely based on comfortability. See, if the world isn’t defined by a set of boundaries – a set of preconstructed ideas and rules that you have to govern your life by, then that can be incredibly uncomfortable for anybody that wants to know where they’re going to be a year from now. What I tend to suggest to people is that if you want to have the success of the people that you aspire to be. Then you need to understand that the first step of that is to step out of that box of preconceived ideas and values, into the world of understanding that there is no preconceived boundaries. Then you can start to move towards success. But to do that, you have to realize that they do not exist.

 

And what I tend to find, especially when I’m coaching clients for the first couple of times, is they’d make statements about rules that exist in the world. Like, “That’s the way everybody in my industry does it, so that’s the way it has to be done.” No, that’s not the way it has to be done – that’s the way everybody else does it, and that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be done that way if you want to be more successful in your industry. If you do everything like everybody else does, then you will achieve the outcomes like everybody else does – or less to that extent. If you do things with an open mind and look for different ways, different niches, different concepts, different ideologies that you can bring into your business. To make it stronger, differentiated. Then you will have more success than everybody else. Because you are not vanilla.

 

I’ve down this with coaching, it was a Christian Minister. And he was a PR agency, and he said, “I don’t want to alienate everybody else by mentioning that I’m Christian Minister.” I said, “There is a group of people that will identify with the fact that you’re a Christian Minister. So rather than being vanilla like everybody else, why don’t you target that specific niche? Soon as he did that, his business turned and he’s gone absolutely milestones ahead of where he was. Picking up clients just by being open to the fact that he can target and alienate a group of people, to specialize in another. As opposed to the rule of, “As a business, we should never alienate a client.” Which is a rule set that he created himself that just didn’t exist. It was within his mind. Now everybody has these different beliefs that exist, that limit them from success. It’s their choice, and they’re an effect of these choices that they’ve made. They can come back to cause and change those decisions or re-evaluate whether they truly exist – open up their mind and achieve a whole different level of success.

 

Host: Yeah I’m listening to this and I was thinking about our conversation off air. When we were talking about the 9 dots. Now some people, some of you listeners may understand what I mean by this. The whole idea is, in this particular test, is to put 9 dots in a square on a piece of paper. But in the center of piece of typing paper. No lines, no boundaries. And tell people that they have to draw 4 lines through these dots, and the 4 lines have to connect twice. And you watch people trying to make this box around the 9 dots, which are in the center. You have an 8 and a half by 11 inch piece of paper. And this little box of 9 dots – imaginary box, ’cause they’re just made into a square. Is sitting in the middle of the paper, only about 2 inches by 2 inches. And people try to make this box around these 9 dots, when they don’t understand that you have the whole sheet of paper to expand out into. And that is thinking quite literally inside the box. You created the box. The box didn’t exist.

 

Matt: What interests me a lot about that specific exercise, and I think I did that in primary school, myself. And I can safely say I was probably an in the box thinker back then, ’cause I know I struggled. However, things change. And this is exactly the point. If I said to myself continuously, “Oh I’m an in the box thinker, I can’t think that way.” Then I would forever not think that way. And I think from this conversation, everybody can tell, I’m a very out of the box thinker now.

 

Host: Oh yeah.

 

Matt: Which means things in every instant – you decide who you want to be, and how you want to live your life. And every second you get another chance to how you do that, and how you redefine yourself. So make it a decision to think outside the square. What I found interesting about that exercise specifically is so many people, before they even start will say, “I’m not good at these types of things.” They’ve already told their brain to fail.

 

Host: Yeah.

 

Matt: Another group of people will start doing it, and within 5 minutes they’re internal monologue inside their head says, “This is hard, you can’t do hard things.” I had a client once that had a father that was a drill sergeant in an Army barracks. And he was, instilled in his child – that if you can’t do something better than everybody else, don’t even bother trying.” Now that was intended to allow the child to excel and move forward. However, instead he decided that in 5 minutes, if he wasn’t master of his own domain, that was a domain that he couldn’t play in. These mindsets are boundaries, limiting decisions to stop you from succeeding in life.

 

Now there can only be a few shining stars, because there has to be a group of people that clean your house. There has to be a group of people that take out the garbage. There has to be people that mow your lawn. And those people, unfortunately, even though to me – those jobs are a lot more effort than what I do for a living, get paid less.

 

Host: Yeah.

Matt: However, they made the decision every single day when they get out of bed, that that’s all they’re ever going to be. If you’re in that situation or a similar situation, you have an option. And this your call to action. And I’ll put it out there as a challenge to you. You can decide to change the way you live your life, change those limiting decisions and change the way you live your life from today. Or, you can stay where it’s safe, and where there’s guarantee that life will be exactly the same tomorrow as it is today in the boundaries and the frameworks that you currently live in.

 

Now I’m not suggesting that you jump outside those barriers. For some people, that’s where they want to live. They’re happy in that life, and that’s all they ever want. And for those people, please feel comfortable with the decision – that you have made, that decision, and live with it. Other people want to talk about being successful but never want to, because they don’t want to step outside those frameworks. And that’s fine too. For for the people that really want change and know their destined for something else, the first step is to step outside that box. So follow us on that journey, do some research on how you can step out of that box. For things in your industry you perhaps haven’t thought of. Send me a question for the next podcast, or find me on matthewpollard.guru and ask me a question. And we will specifically work at trying to open up your mind.

 

Host: Indeed. So once again, as you heard Matthew just say, if you want to send questions for Matthew for the next podcast – send it to info@kwave6radio.tk. You can find this on our website, which you’ll hear at the end of the show. And Matthew, again, what is your website address? And if you have anything else you want to share with us, just in closing – we have to do the close right now though.

 

Sure, definitely. So you can find me on matthewpollard.guru. You can also find me on Facebook at facebook.com/matthewpollardspeaker. On Google+ with the exact same tag line. And you can also find me on Twitter @matthewpollard_.

 

Host: Wonderful. Thank you Matthew, stick around. As we’re closing here, I’d just like to remind you that you can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Podcast.com, on an rss feed. All of this is available on our home page. And we are also on YouTube. Our venues, our players are computer and smartphone friendly. So you can listen to us on the go or at home. Whichever you feel comfortable with. You can also subscribe to all of our players. All of our shows are free. And you can also subscribe to our blog, so you get see some of our quotations, information that we put out there usually Monday through Friday only.

 

And I also ask that you support our advertisers. And if you didn’t hear our advertisers, you forgot about it – go to our website and click on the navigation menu, “Advertisers.” And you can click on any of their links for free. And if you have any suggestions or comments for any other future shows, whatever – send it to the same information at information– Excuse me, info@kwave6radio.tk. Once again Matthew, thank you for being on K WAVe 6 radio. And we look forward to having you again soon. By the way, do you want to mention that you will be out of town or out of reach for a while or–?

 

Matt: Yeah I’ll take this opportunity to thank everybody for listening. I know that you only have a certain amount of time in your day. So I really appreciate you putting me inside your head for the last hour. I will be overseas for the next 3 and a half weeks. I’ll be in Europe for that time. So I’m off on holiday, so I really appreciate everyone spending time with me. And if you do send through any inquiries or anything like that, please know I will get back to you. But I personally respond to people’s emails and I personally respond to my Twitter feed. It will be 3, 3 and a half weeks from now when I get back to you. So thank you very much again.

 

Host: Wonderful. Thanks again for everyone for listening, and we’ll see you again soon. Be well.

 

Thank you for being part of our audience, for more information about K WAVe 6 radio, and the services we offer go to www.kwave6radio.tk. Have a wonderful day. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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