What Would My Best Self Do?

Alright, so this is gonna be a quick hitting little episode. Hope to bring you just a little nugget of value, something to think about here today. And it’s something that I think about a lot. I heard Alex Ramozzi frame this a while back in a really interesting way. So I’m gonna use his frame, but then I’m gonna share some resources that you can use to apply it inside of your own life. But one of the things that you will, as you start building your business, as you start growing as an individual, is like you’re trying to get someplace, right? You’re trying to grow to a certain place that you have inside of your mind a vision for the future of what you’re capable of, that highest and best, greatest version of yourself that you’re trying to close the gap on and try to become, because you know, you have this potential inside of you. And so entrepreneurship and building a business can be this vehicle for personal development, personal growth that we realize to get from where I am to where I want to be, I need to grow, right? If I want to go from being a seven figure to an eight figure business, I first need to become a, to become an eight figure entrepreneur, I need to have those skills, those mindsets, those beliefs. And so there are no business problems, there’s just you problems, right? A limitation of your skills, beliefs, traits, whatever.

And the key to unlocking the growth in the business is to unlock the growth in yourself. And as we’re moving on this personal development journey, we can often recognize, okay, I’m not where I want to be. I want to be a little bit healthier. I want to have this type of body, I want to eat better, I want to wake up in the morning, I want to be work, I want to do deep work at this time. And like, we have this standard of who we want to be, we have this vision of it. But it can be very hard on the day to day basis to make the decisions that would move you towards your greatness rather than move you away. And I’ve talked about this in the context of the plus one decision making framework in the past, which is just to view every decision you could make as either moving you forward in life or moving you back, and not worrying about the amplitude of the decision. Not saying, oh, this is a very important decision.

It has the potential to move me ten places forward or ten places back, but instead just to say every decision, brushing my teeth in the morning, that’s a plus one decision. You know, having that tough phone call with a, with a partner, that’s a plus one decision. Making that big sale, that’s a plus one decision. All decisions are ranked equally, and so we treat them all with the same level of importance. Right? And when you take that mindset to everything that you do, then you’re going to be faced with a lot of instances in your day to day life where you’re like, okay, what should I do? What is the plus one decision here? The way that Alex frames this, and I find this to be a really good frame, is what would a wise man do? What would the wise man do here? Or what would the eight figure entrepreneur, what would the billionaire do here? Or what would the patient person, or what would the boo do here? Like, what would Jesus do? Right? That’s probably if we go back like, the WWJD bracelets. What would a wise man do? What would a fit man do? What would the fit woman do? Like, what are the decisions that person would make in this moment? That can be a really interesting, helpful frame to get you outside of who you are right now, which is, by definition, not yet that person that you’re trying to become. But you can future cast yourself into their, in their shoes, use empathy to see the world through their eyes, and then use that judgment and experience that they’ve used have acquired to help you in the moment. And this is a very powerful, very powerful tool that we humans have, which is the ability to put ourselves into other people’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.

So why not put yourself in the shoes of a wise man, or put yourself in the shoes of the person who is where you want to go? And then ask yourself, what is the decision that they would make here? How would they behave? How would they act? What would they do next? There’s a really great book that I want to share with you called the alter ego effect by Todd Herman. And what he found is that not only can we put ourselves into the shoes of other people, but we can create characters in our own mind, in our own environment, and say, I am Batman. I am Beyonce. I am whoever, right? Like, Kobe Bryant had the mamba mentality. He had this alter ego that he would step into when he was on the court. And just by having this mental frame of who is this other person that I can step into, what are the qualities, the traits, the skills, the beliefs that person has? And then when you go to whatever domain it is that you’re using, this alter ego, maybe you have an alter ego for when you go into business meetings, you have a different alter ego when you’re getting on social media, a different alter ego when you go into the gym to get your workout in, what are the decisions? How would that person show up? That can be such a powerful way of changing our behaviors. I’ve seen some really interesting studies over the years about biases and stereotypes that we have about our competency, related to, say, our skin color to our gender. A really classic example of this is that historically, women have scored worse on math tests than men have.

There’s a lot of reasons, perhaps, for this. We’re not going to get into the details of that. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not. What matters is that if women believe it’s true and women do carry the stereotype, and what the studies show is that when they sit down before you take the math test, if the researchers pre qualify with some questions and ask you to state your gender, state your name, those types of things, the women perform worse than in the control studies where they’re not asked those questions. There’s some priming effect just by saying, I am a woman, that then they go, oh, women don’t score as well in math tests. And then they fulfill that prophecy in a very interesting way. They’ve shown this effect in gender, they’ve shown it in race, and it’s wild. It’s wild how powerful it can be.

But we can change the effect. Simply what they did in this instance with the women is they had the women write a different name at the top of the paper, and in the instances where they wrote the name of a male, they actually scored better. Now, I’m not saying that you need to go create an alter ego, that you’re a male or whatever, but just be aware that we have these innate biases inside of us, that society is programmed into us regardless of whether there’s truth behind them or not. And by being conscious of that and then showing up with intention as the type of person who excels in that environment, by creating an alter ego that says, this guy, my alter ego. When I sit down to do math problems, I’m freaking Einstein. I’m the best mathematician in the room. Right? By stepping into that greatness, you then as a result, your performance is enhanced. So I find that to be just really, really interesting.

So take that. Use it into your own life in whatever way that you find applicable. I hope it brings you a ton of value. And I did another podcast going deeper on the alter ego effect, so go check that out if you want to go even deeper onto how to create that Persona that you can adopt, and then the different ways that you can trigger that Persona on command. Go check that out, and then I’ll see you guys in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.