How to Create Success from Scratch: Dr. Michelle Rozen’s 3-Step Formula

0:00If you're waiting for the right time to take that step, you're waiting for something that is never ever going to happen. So you might as well do that now. Anything you want to do, it's never the right time. It's always too early, too late. You're too busy. Do it anyway. Dr. Michelle Rosen, The 6 % Club. What do you do that makes someone a performer? How do you get someone to actually achieve the results they want? You've got to condition yourself to develop healthy habits that carry you through. That generating of success, it's a process of becoming. It will never be the right time to take the first step.

0:32The psychology of change. How You Generate Success with Dr. Michelle Rosen. So, Michelle, we're talking about creation of success. What is the Michelle Rosen formula for creating success in life? I came to that formula, Brad, after so many years of encountering so much pain. So there's so much pain in the world. You know, people want things and it's not working out for them. And my concern about that is that pretty soon somebody starts saying to themselves, maybe I'm just not, I'm not good enough because I want those things and they're not happening. And so the goal is, I mean, this is 2025. We got to make it a good year.

1:13We have to. What are we doing differently this year compared to the years before? That's the million dollar question. And I think the main goal is to generate success. This is why I love the name of your podcast so much. And thank you for having me a second time. The great success. So how do we generate that? How do we generate success? And the problem that most people have is that they haven't experienced success. They know failure zone. Like they've tried, they dropped things, they wanted things that didn't work out for them. That's the comfort zone. That's familiar territory. Success, you know, that sounds, you know, very vague.

1:55Let me give you an example. I was talking to my niece and she's a singer. She's a very talented singer. And she talked to me about how she's afraid of success. And I said, listen, success is such a big word. Tell me what success means to you. And it was hard for her to define. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that success to her means having 60 people in a room in her show that are not friends and family. I said, fine. Now that you've defined that, after much thinking, let's see how we get there. See the problem? When you talk about success as an obscure thing, oh, it becomes very scary. We have to make it 2025.

2:36We're making it familiar. We're making it concrete. We're making it happen. I love the word you use, generate success. Why did you choose that word? Because I think it's important. Let's talk about what success is and then we'll see how to generate it, right? So to me, the Michelle Rosen definition, to me, success means that I said that I will do something and I was actually able to make it happen. And that can be super small. I can say, Brad, you know what? I'm not drinking enough water. I have a goal to drink more water. Now I need to make it happen. I can have the same type of discussion about, you know, big goals, small goals.

3:18I need to work out more. I need to save more money. I mean, it can be a lot of things. Success to me is I said X and X happened. And when I say generate success, I mean at any scale. That means that it can be super small. I just want to get that dopamine rush. I want to get that sensation, that experience of I said that something will happen. And it happened. And so my recommendation is always, come on, start small. Don't overwhelm yourself. Say that you will do X and be consistent. Make it happen. Because what happens is when you generate that success and you actually follow through, even if it's super small, this is when you tell yourself, I am so cool.

4:06Wouldn't you look at me? You know, I said that I'm going to drink two gallons of water a day. Guess what I did for the past month? I've been drinking two gallons of water a day. I am cool. Now let's talk about my business. Now let's talk about my relationship. And so it becomes familiar territory. It becomes an identity. This is why, you know, the whole 6 % club and the 6 %ers. I am the kind of person that if I said that I will do this, I made it happen. And so no judgment, you know, it can be something related to your kids, something related to your health, something related, something super dumb and stupid.

4:44Fine. Generate it. Make it happen. How much does that on a roll feeling thing indicate or how much does that play a part of people succeeding? It's everything. It's everything. The way you perceive yourself impacts the choices that you make. So if I perceive myself as the kind of person that says something and actually makes it happen over time the more it happens to me the more that's my experience the more ambitious i'm going to be i'm going to say hey i'm doing this i'm doing this i'm doing how about i pick a bigger goal you know and so i already know how to do this i'm on familiar territory i'm much more likely to follow through and that becomes part of my identity and you know what brad even if i fail and i struggle and I have a hard time, I have that identity.

5:39I have that experience of I'm the type of person who says that they will do something and actually follows through. So I'm much more likely now to be more resilient. I'm gonna figure it out because this is who I am. This is my experience. Now compare that to someone who talks about success in vague terms, always drops the ball and that's their familiar territory. That's what they know, you know, big difference. What about the person that they're driving a beat up Toyota Camry and they set the I'm going to be driving a Lamborghini goal. Tell us about what happens when someone does that versus the small goals, that sort of thing.

6:22I mean, it doesn't happen overnight. You drive a beat up car and you want to drive a Lamborghini by all means, make it happen. How are you going to make it happen? It's a series of actions. Maybe you want to go back to school. Maybe you want to open a business. Maybe you want to have a new podcast. Maybe you want to grow your social media following. It's a series of choices that you're making and how you're allocating your time that takes you there. So we're still down to you got up in the morning. Did you make the calls that you had to make? Did you, you know, fill up the business paperwork? Did you take the actions, the business, the marketing actions that you needed to take?

6:58If you're driving a beat up car and your dream is to drive a Lamborghini, by all means, make it happen. Make it happen the same way that you can drink more water, get healthier, put more steps into your day, you know, be more active. You can get there. It takes time. I changed my life. Other people can change their lives, too. What is it, though, that stops people from using the micro goal thing? You know, it's like it seems, well, we've got the dream chart. We got the this and the that and it's fancy and it's fun and all that. But those micro goals, doing the calls, doing the business transaction, doing that stuff.

7:36How do we get people to make sure they are using the micro goals? So. I personally like to use a very simple system. I just use a simple sticky note. and every day I write on that sticky note the three things that are going to happen today no matter what. Three things that I don't care. I'm sick. I'm tired. I don't have the patience. I have a hundred. It doesn't matter. And so that gives me the mental clarity on three actions that are going to happen that will move me forward. Now, sometimes when you're moving forward, Brad, and I'm sure you experienced that too, you're not seeing it. So you're not seeing your own progress, but actually you're making big leaps.

8:18But on a day-to-day, make sure no day goes by where you didn't at least do three things that push you closer where you want to go. Love it. Brilliant. Let's talk about, you know, we're in the start of the year where, you know, at that point of, well, my resolutions, maybe I should, well, I'm not getting where I wanted to be. The idea of quitting on yourself or resigning backwards, I guess, to those old ways. How do we either stop that or what leads to that and how do we stop it? I probably think it'd be a better way to help us understand that. So I'm not a big fan of writing down your New Year's resolutions and making a big list because I think the brain gets completely overwhelmed.

9:09You get overwhelmed. it's just, it's too big. It's too much. You take one thing, you pick one thing and you automate it in your brain. It takes 30 days to automate it. And so if I'm going to say for the next 30, because after that you get, you get the neural pathway in your brain, it's automated. You do it without thinking, but it takes 30 days to get there. And so if I said to myself, you know, I'm going to take an hour walk every day. And I just, you know, I do it. I do it. I do it. Now, Now, let's say, Brad, I did it for two weeks. And after two weeks, I was getting kind of lazy about it. And I was like, I don't know.

9:46It's too hot. It's too cold. It's too this. It's too that. Stop doing it. You can always go back to the beginning line and say, well, I got to automate this thing. This is very important. It's important for my health. So I got to generate that success. It's back to generating that success. No problem. I go back to the beginning line. All I need to do is do the same thing for 30 days until it's automated in your brain. So we are the total of the habits that we have and people that are able to generate success, develop habits over time that are good for them. You know, it's about how they manage their morning.

10:24What is their morning routine? What is their evening routine? How they make decisions. And so pick, you know, one thing to focus on for 30 days and every day pick three actions on a sticky note that you're going to do no matter what. It's that mental clarity that gets you out of big concepts. Oh, success. Oh, other people. Oh, everybody's doing better than me. Confused. No, no. Get the mental clarity. What do you want to automate in your brain for 30 days? What are three actions you're taking today to make sure to push through and push through? Yeah. It's interesting. You said something there that made me think, you know, when people stop doing the goal, like I had a goal of doing it for 30 days.

11:10I stopped at day 17. Dude, just start again. start again but not from day 17 that's that's your that's your penalty there like you know day one you go back to day one but listen i mean there are habits that i have that i'm sure you have things that i do that i do without thinking like i i i love my walks i love my walks it's my favorite workout same route pretty much at the same time if it rains i'm very confused i'm very I mean, I look at the clock and I'm like, what am I supposed to do? What do people do with it? I walk at this time of the day. So it's that level of, because I did it so many times.

11:51I'm way past the 30 days. It's like, I'm conditioned to do it. You've got to condition yourself to develop healthy habits that carry you through. And so it's that generating of success. It's a process of becoming. You become the type of person who sets goals, says that they would not let's not even to call it goals, says that they will do something and actually follows through. It's as simple as that. Yeah, I love that languaging around it. I think it's really important to just sort of say it doesn't have to be a goal. It's just I'm going to do this. And you go do it and you're going to do it and you're going to find that, you know, let's not think that the six percenters are you know everybody in Hollywood and their sister not necessarily it's it could be you know your next door neighbor it could be someone that you're not even thinking but it's the type of people that develop the mindset that if they said something they are going to follow through and there's a little bit of a problem I agree with you Brad with the word goals because people feel that if they said the word goal, it has to be something impressive.

13:04And I say, don't even think about that. Think about something that you want to see happening. How are you going to get there? What do you need to do today, tomorrow, the day after to make sure you get there? Yeah, I was stuck with a few business owners the other day and they're looking for the magic bullet. And I said, guys, it's not one thing that 100 % changes your life. It's 101 % things that change your life. And all you got to do is look for that one or two tiny things that can start the ball rolling. And if that's, you know, the ball doesn't roll if you don't start on that one. So I want to ask then, I hit day 17.

13:42How do I stay firm with myself? How do I get myself into that or, you know, keep going, I guess, is the question. I'm a big fan of electronics, you know, set reminders on every single device that you have. because your brain doesn't want to do it. Your brain says, well, you've always been dropping the ball. How about we just do that again? But if you set a reminder and you stay with the same time, and let's say you said you're going to work out at seven and at five minutes to seven, 15 minutes to seven, every single device you have says, do the thing, do the thing, do the thing. You know, after 30 days, you're not going to need reminders anymore.

14:21That's what you're doing at that time of the day. But notes on the fridge, reminders on your phone, reminders on your laptop, reminders on your watch. You've got to condition. You know what it is, Brad? You manipulate the environment through those devices rather than fighting with your willpower. Because willpower, who trusts it? You know, I have willpower now. I'm not going to have it in the evening. I'll be too tired. So why would I trust my willpower and build my whole life around sometimes I have it, sometimes I don't. instead of that when you manipulate the environment set reminders on your devices now okay okay so now we're doing the thing i remember a period in my life where i didn't like working out and i paid someone to show up at my house every day at the same time for 90 straight days like i paid him his 90 days worth of money so you cannot not show up you're you're gonna because when i'm logical, I can make that decision.

15:18It's in the emotive moment of, holy, is he here? Oh my God, he's here. Is he really here? No, he's not. Yeah, he's here. Oh, I got to get up and go do this. You know what I mean? It was like, I knew I wouldn't have that willpower. So yeah, manipulate the environment. I love that way of looking at it. So let's talk about restarting then? Because whether it is restarting from missing a day or restarting from, you know, I'm 50 and I've never got there or, you know, how do we restart? How do we ignite ourselves to get back on the horse or even get on the horse for the first time? I have a sentence that I always go back to and I developed it in the course of my life when I almost wanted to give up.

16:04And I say, it will never be the right time. Take the first step. because whatever I've done in my life, Brad, it was never the right time. I went back to school for my master's and my PhD when I was a full-time working mom of three very young kids. I used to set up alarms for 3 a.m., wake up at 3, study from 3 to 6. The economy collapsed. It was 2008. Everything worked against me. I could have been one of those people that say, I'll take a break. I'll come back when the time is right and never come back. But I didn't. It wasn't the right time. I did it anyway. When I wrote The Six Percent Club, the publisher told me, oh, Michelle, nobody publishes books in the summer.

16:46If you get it to us by this deadline, we can publish it in the spring. So, you know, it's a process of becoming. Now you tell someone like me, there's a deadline. I'm like, OK, I'm making it to the deadline. Was it the right time for me? Absolutely not. I was too busy. I didn't have time. I was in flights all the time. I did it anyway. So my conclusion after, you know, my own path and everything that I know and experience myself at this point is if you're waiting for the right time to take that step, you're waiting for something that is never, ever going to happen. So you might as well do that now.

17:23And there's never a right time. So if you're 50 and you want to go back to school, do it. If you're 60 or 70 and you want to go back to school, do it. Anything you want to do, it's never the right time. It's always too early, too late. You're too busy. Do it anyway. Leveling up then. You know, we talk, people often see quitting or stopping as a bad word. Sometimes though in life, there's a right time to quit. Quit a job, quit living in a city, quit a group of friends, quit going to a certain place that brings out a negative version of you. How do you get, I don't know if it's the courage or the brain power, what's the steps to when you know you're going down the wrong path to just say it's time to stop, it's time to change.

18:14How would you recommend people can do that? Because maybe I need that advice right now, Michelle, on a couple of things. I don't know. Can we say that the world's most successful people are, you know, The mindset is they never quit, but the reality is they do quit on a lot of things that are not right for them. Yeah. Stopping is, in my books, one of the biggest keys to success. Stopping doing dumb things. Stop doing the negative things. Stop doing things. In fact, God, Michelle, I would say stopping is more important than starting in success in some ways. Yes, because you have this much to give.

18:50You have this much energy and this much time. And if you're wasting it, spending it on the wrong people, the wrong things, then with that energy, you could have been doing the right things for you. And I find that a lot of times people have that mindset of, no, no, you know, to be successful, you have to never quit. No, no. Sometimes you have to quit the things that are not right for you. And I mean, to me, I use the zero to 10 rule for that, which is, you know, a tool that I have for measuring how right is something for you. And so if you say zero to 10, how right is this relationship for me?

19:24How right is this business for me? This job for me? Those people for me? And your answer to yourself is, well, I don't know, maybe it's like a three. Oh, you're wasting your time on the wrong time, wrong people, wrong things. If your answer to yourself is 10, you're in the right place with the right people, with the right, you know, doing the right things. And so don't quit on your 10s. absolutely quit on your threes and twos and ones and zero. It's a total waste of time. And I've done that. I gave up. Same like you, Brad. I gave up on first semester in college when I was very young. I was at a college that I didn't like.

20:03I left the college before the final exams of the first semester. And everybody said, well, you know, at least stay for the exams. And I said, I don't like this place. This is the wrong place for me. I'm out. And you know what? It was the right decision. Don't stay just because you are afraid to make that decision of this is a three. I got to put my life is short. I got to put my time where it's a 10 for me because my time is limited yeah what about uh let's do two subjects firstly saying no successful people can say no must say no are amazing at saying no to almost everything so you have to get really comfortable with setting boundaries and saying no without getting a stomach ache and i was the kind of person i was the kind of person who would get the stomach ache where you know i would i you know So society teaches you to be nice.

21:04And what does being nice mean? Let's break it down. Being nice means in that sense of not saying no, that you're going to take your daily amount of time and energy and you're just going to give it out to people because you can't say no. I mean, would you ever go into your checking account and just give out cash to people just because they're asking, right? You wouldn't. It's a resource. You don't do that. You decide how to spend your money. So the same thing with your time and energy. If you can't say no to people, then you have less time, less energy to focus on your tens, the things that matter the most to you.

21:39And you're just giving it out free just because you don't want to get that stomach ache. And to me, you know, I was kind of I was kind of that person until the pandemic. and in the pandemic, my time was so limited and my energy was so scarce and I had big goals and things that I wanted to do that I just started saying no. And what I found out, Brad, and it's really amazing is that I found out that what happened as a result is nothing, nobody, I mean, if anything, I got more respect from the people around me and I had more time. So the benefits to me were so great and nothing happened. No one had a problem with it.

22:21I just needed to get clear with saying, this is a no, not now, not this, not at this moment. And my life improved drastically. Well, hey there, and thanks for listening. I've noticed that 78 % of you are brand new, which means you haven't hit the subscribe button yet. By subscribing, you help us bring on even better guests, better quality content, and serve you better with even more podcasts. So please hit that subscribe button. It only takes a second. And it makes a huge difference. If you support us, we're going to support your success and help you achieve big success together. Now, one of the things I've always done, and we teach it to all the business owners we coach, is to create for yourself a default calendar, default diary.

23:05You know, this is, in these two hours, I'll be doing this. And it's almost like defining your greatest week ever sort of thing. Like in a great week, in a perfect week, in the right week, I would do this between these hours, this, this, this. These are the things I'm doing. And what I've found is by defining that, it's easier to say no. Be like, no, no, sorry, I've got to be doing, I've got a marketing meeting then. Now, who's the marketing meeting with? With me. I'm in the marketing meeting with myself. And it's like even my assistant knows whenever I'm doing something, it's like when someone calls for me, it's like, no, no, Brad's in a meeting.

23:44Brad's with someone right now. You know, and it's like, oh, he's with someone. Oh, OK, I'll call back later. You know, it's like, yeah, I'm with me. Brilliant. First of all, I'm going to adopt this. This is this is brilliant. This is really, really good. I love it. I think it's it's I'm going to guess that after you've done that for a while, by the way, you manipulated your environment just right there alone to help you in saying no. But there are also the situations where it's at your face, you know, where someone is asking for your time or energy or, you know, and we all know the energy vampires out there that would suck out every single piece of, you know, energy that you have in you.

24:27And sometimes it's in your face and you have to get really good at saying, I'm really, really sorry. I can't do that right now. And then in the nicest way, just set a very firm boundary. I also am lucky enough to have five kids and a wonderful wife. And I was like, yeah, I'd love to, but kids got a basketball game that day. You know, it's like between hockey, basketball, singing, acting, I'm pretty sure my kids have something every single day of the year. But, you know, one of my buddies recently invited me on a trip, and he goes, hey, we're going to do this trip, and we're going to all go, and we're going to do this and this and this.

25:02I said, yeah, I'm busy that weekend. He said, I didn't even told you when. I said, I know. I'm still busy that weekend. but um my my mom was the best for me when i was young and really working hard and there was family events and she would always anytime there was a big family thing like the extended family said oh brad's now brad's traveling that weekend he'll be he's busy so my mom would protect me my assistant protects my time but when we look at leveling up stopping is sort of phase one of leveling up, stopping doing something that is taking you away from your ideal self, your ideal world, the 6 % version of you, how does someone actually go, you know what, I haven't had that level of success in the past, or I haven't been successful in that area in the past.

25:52How do they switch? How do we get them thinking in that way? Is it just as simple as starting, or is there more to it than that? First of all, I want to go back to what you just described, because I thought it was really cool. And I think the key is there. So notice how you're describing how much you're protecting yourself and your time and your energy. And not only that, but you have people and things in your environment that are helping you. I mean, you're guarding it so much, which is so important. That was the perfect example. Whoever's listening, that was a perfect example of how you do it to the point that even your mom knows to protect.

26:31Let's all help Brad guard his time and energy because he needs it because you have five kids and you have, you know, business things you need to do and you need your time and energy. Imagine you didn't have that. Most people don't have that fence that you've built that is so important for success. So I would actually go to what you just described right now and I would say, guys, this is the first step. This is the first thing that you do. You start guarding your time and energy by saying no to people and things that don't matter. That's the first step. Specifically towards your new goal, I think, or your new reality that you're aiming to create, if we can drop the word goal out for you.

27:11But if someone once said to me, you don't achieve your dreams and goals, you fall to the level of your schedule or your systems. that yeah you've just reminded me right there if i don't schedule allocate time towards my new goal allocate i put it in the dang calendar every one of us has a a machine these days that tells us what we're doing when hmm this has been like a michelle coaching brad session this is great No, it goes both ways. We're coaching each other. But you know what I would schedule, Brad? I would schedule a pause. And I'll tell you why. When you drive your vehicle, right? You drive your vehicle, you come to an intersection.

28:01Now you can go straight, you can go right, you can go left. God forbid my 17 year old just took her car today to school for the second time in her life. I'm like, you know, please try carefully. So, you know, hopefully when she's coming to an intersection, she's going to stop, pause, then take the turn. If she doesn't, that's a very dangerous turn. Most of the people take turns in their lives without pausing before. And I encourage everyone to build a pause into every day where you get to think. When I say take out a sticky note and write your three most important things to happen that day, that's a pause.