"Psycho-Cybernetics" is one of my personal favorite books, and when I first read it, the underlying idea hit me like a ton of bricks and made a huge impact on my mindset. 

What if we thought of our subconscious as our own success mechanism? 

For ghostwriter, book coach, and book editor Deborah Ager, this book came into her life at a time of great personal adversity, and it helped her take steps forward. In this episode, we talk about what we learned from the book and how we put its ideas into practice. 

Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode 

Why clarifying our ideas is so important 

You can have a really powerful idea and one that has a lot of potential, but if it’s buried within a book, even if it’s written very well, it can screw up that whole idea by making it confusing or diluting it. 

The big takeaway from "Psycho-Cybernetics" 

We’re all equipped with a mechanism in our subconscious we can use to direct to any outcome. It’s like a heat-seeking missile that can go in a positive or negative direction depending on the underlying beliefs that fuel it. 

How to combat doubt and flesh out an idea  

Whether you’re writing a book or starting a podcast, what holds people back from clarity is self-doubt that comes in the form of questions. Clarity is about getting the ideas out and realizing that they’re going to be messy at this stage, and that’s okay. 

Guest Bio 

Deborah Ager is a ghostwriter, book coach, book editor and host of The SOS Show. She helps ambitious entrepreneurs become authors of sales, leadership and personal development books. 

For more information, head to https://www.radiantmedialabs.com/ and connect with her on LinkedIn.  

Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

“Traction” and its Entrepreneurial Operating System has had a huge impact on entrepreneurs of all types. Most of us are grappling with the question of turning our own unique way of solving problems into a system that has a strong selling proposition. 

In this episode, consultant and founding partner at Scalto, Gabriela Pulido shares how this book helped her set and reinforce a new strategic direction for her business.

Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode 

Working with a client vs. working for a client

There’s two ways to bring a strategy to completion - dump it on the client and leave them to implement or draw the client into the process and work with them. The only way to really have their by-in is to allow them to participate and create the strategy with you. 

Why entrepreneurs struggle to find their integrator 

It’s rare to find someone that fits you like a puzzle and does the things you’re weak at  so you can just be the visionary and throw stuff over your shoulder to them as you’re running 100 miles per hour. 

The right way to go about scaling

If you’re drawn to scaling, it’s tempting to build things that are scalable first and sellable second, and skip over the most important part - whether the customer actually wants to buy it. It’s way better to figure out what the customer actually wants and what’s such a no-brainer that they will absolutely say yes to and then scale and systematize it. 

Guest Bio 

Gabriela Pulido is the founding partner at Scalto, an agency that helps financial firms navigate through the challenges of becoming truly scalable. Their focus is enabling firms to jump ahead of the competition by designing all aspects of a truly scalable business: the offering, the client experience, the brand and the communications and lead generation process. For more information head to https://www.scalto.com/. 

“Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business” by Gino Wickman

From an author’s perspective, there’s no greater achievement than having your ideas become so deeply ingrained and absorbed that people unconsciously implement them. If there are two books that have rightfully earned that status, it would be “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Ries and Trout and “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore. 

These books have made a life changing impact on a marketer I really respect, Christopher Lochhead, so much so that he believes any card-carrying marketer can’t consider themselves one without reading them. 

In this episode, master of category design, bestselling author of Play Bigger and host of Follow Your Different, shares how these books have informed his thinking on marketing. 

Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode 

How to turn ideas into unconscious competence

Don’t just declare a new discipline or new way of thinking, codify it and introduce new frameworks and lenses so that people can take the framework and do something different with it.  

Personal branding is the “modern entrepreneurial herpes” 

The problem with personal branding is that it’s nothing more than a symptom of the “me disease” that plagues marketing today. In a world of influencers, it’s really easy to think your marketing’s about you, but the truth is no one cares about you outside of the component of you that’s illustrative of something they want. 

How to Cross the Chasm 

The most powerful marketing is word of mouth, but how do you scale it? By building momentum inside of an industry, and letting those verticals influence each other. If we throttle hard on certain demographics and even geographics, we won’t usually need as many people as we think to turn a category.

Guest Bio 

Christopher Lochhead is an entrepreneur, master of category design, #1 business podcaster, the 11-time #1 bestselling author of Play Bigger. He’s the host of Follow Your Different and Lochhead on Marketing, and he writes Category Pirates, a top 0.5% paid business newsletter on Substack. 

To listen to the podcasts and subscribe to Category Pirates, head to https://lochhead.com/. 

“The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Al Ries and Jack Trout

“Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore