What I love about the Business Outlaws podcast is that BigMike Straumietis, Chris Collins and host Jamie Foxx expose insider secrets that help you expand your personal and business life. They understand how these elements intertwine to help you master your personal life to become a business leader. This process is ongoing, and you must always find methods to eliminate the obstacles that can derail you.

In Episode 9 of Business Outlaws, “Taking Out The Mind Trash,” these high achievers share insights from their own lives and careers about how to achieve success. From practical tools to useful advice that most people pay thousands of dollars to hear at leadership seminars, these guys give away for free the most important insights, because they know what it’s like to start from the bottom.

Take the time to listen to Episode 9, because hearing these business powerhouses share their insights with such spectacular clarity is like watching a lightning storm in the mountains. If you’re short on time, though, here are the highlights to discuss with your friends and put into action now.

What Is Mind Trash?

I love this term coined by BigMike because it sounds like exactly what it is. Mind trash is the thoughts and habits that interfere with your performance in both your personal and professional life. These are self-defeating attitudes and beliefs that someone pushes on you and that you come to believe.

Mind trash clouds your thoughts, skews your judgement and throws you off your game. Mind trash undermines your confidence and makes you second guess your instincts. It can make you blame other people or circumstances for performance mistakes and leads you to make poor decisions that impact your personal and professional relationships.

According to BigMike, mind trash holds you back, and dealing with it is an absolute must if you want to achieve your goals. “You can make excuses or you can get shit done,” BigMike says, “but you can’t do both.” So let’s talk about the most important points for creating change in your life.

The Two Key Elements For Mastering Mind Trash

Before you can get to work on any task, you have to accurately assess the situation. Learning to face the truth is the first step in dealing with mind trash.

BigMike says, “What people don’t understand is that you can learn all the marketing business, all the stuff, but if you don’t have the right mindset, you will fail. Our society is set up to program us for defeat, actually. All the shit that we’re told — it does affect us. It’s not only other people’s stuff, but our own stuff as well.”

Other people’s trash and internalized ideas about they perceive you can easily knock you off your game if you don’t recognize the source of these messages. Once you do, you need to get to work on recalibrating your mindset to  make a positive shift in your personal life, which will then positively impact your business life. Thankfully, you can develop specific attitudes and use proven tools to help you achieve these goals.

Tuning Up Your Self-Image

Chris Collins says, “More than anything else, how you see yourself, and then how you feel about yourself, determine how you act and what your goals are. A lot of times with people, their goals are small because that’s the image they have of themselves.”

Your self-image dictates what you’ll try to accomplish, because unconscious, self-limiting scripts are playing out in the back of your mind without you even knowing it. Becoming aware of these inherited and self-perpetuating attitudes is important because once you are aware, you can implement strategic change.

BigMike adds, “The people who become really successful in life are the ones who are able to move past that and compartmentalize it or do whatever you have to deal with it.” There are other techniques they discuss for building a strong self-image, but BigMike has a simple idea you can try right now:

“Listen to people who’ve accomplished something. They definitely have a different mindset than the normal person.”

Good thing you’ve already got BigMike and Chris “Bulldog” Collins on your team, so you don’t have to waste your time trying to discover these insights on your own.

Accepting Your Authentic Self

BigMike, Chris and host Jamie Foxx all agree that learning to accept and act from your authentic self is the cornerstone of creating success. Jamie has great insights on this:

“You have to be comfortable with yourself, like when you’re alone, and there’s no TV on, there’s no cellphone, and it’s just you.”

Once you get to this point, it solidifies your self-confidence and shows that you’re a true leader. When you embrace yourself fully, she continues, then you come to a point where you say, “Take it or leave it, this is me. I think it’s not [just] searching for acceptance; it’s searching for self-acceptance.” To do this, you have to own all your strengths and flaws exactly as you are now. Jamie goes on to say, “If that’s who you are, that’s who you are. Accept it and people will buy into what you’re selling. There like, ‘Oh, I believe him because he believes him.’”

This sounds simple, but it’s incredibly important. Once you own who you are, you don’t have to spend time covering up and building a front because people have good in-built BS detectors and they simply won’t trust you.

Once you embrace yourself, things get good. Chris says, “So, there’s this certain liberation to becoming authentic and realizing I’m a go-getter. Maybe everybody isn’t going to like what I do, but I’m going to provide value to the world, as long as my ethics and intentions are pure. That’s the permission that I think a lot of people are waiting for.”

What’s important to realize here is that Chris is also saying people may not give you permission to do what you want to do. The only person who can truly do that is you. And you do that by having an authentic self-image and by taking out the mind trash, over and over, until your mind is uncluttered.

Practical Steps For Taking Out the Mind Trash

OK, so while all these ideas are well and good, what are the practical things you can do now to change your self-image and learn to be your authentic self everyday?

Find A Skilled Psychotherapist

Earlier, BigMike said that successful people learn to move beyond or compartmentalize their mind trash — but how do you do that? With the help of a qualified psychiatric professional. Therapy doesn’t mean you’re nuts. Rather, it means you’ve found a specially trained expert who is helping you with your quest for self improvement.

BigMike is dead accurate when he says, “Everyone’s issues about themselves pretty much come from childhood. It comes from mommy issues, daddy issues, bullying, sexual abuse — those are the big four. You have to deal with all that stuff because you won’t think that you’re good enough, and it goes pretty deep.”

The reality is that you just can’t deal with such issues on your own. You need a trained expert who can provide external perspective and use proven techniques to sift through your experiences, good or bad. Whether you’re on a tight budget or you can afford the best therapy, you need to find a professional who you can trust and who uses a method that works for you.

BigMike goes on to talk about why it’s so important to complete this internal work: “You have to unravel those things because, as you become more and more successful in life, you’re gonna have more shit come at you — it’s not less, it’s more — and you have to be able to discern what’s important and what’s not.” Psychotherapy not only gets you to understand how you work and resolves issues that hold you back, it also makes you more resilient and able to take on the escalating challenges that success will bring.

Understand Your Belief System

You have to understand your belief system and your values because they define who you are. The real trick is understanding what you’ve passively taken in versus what you’ve learned to be true through your experience.

Chris puts it another way: “I think an important thing to ask yourself about is what your belief system is. Is your belief system something somebody told you and conditioned you to buy into? Did our school system or society or Fox News, condition you, or is it something you know first-hand? Because, usually what you learn first-hand is different than what everybody else is trying to get you to believe.”

This self-reflection links to the therapy used to fortify your self-image and authentic self. Asking these hard questions to discern your core beliefs will define you and guide many of your business and personal decisions. Once you go through this process, it will become intuitive and help to build your successes.

Use High-Performance Visualization Techniques

BigMike and Chris are big fans of surgeon Maxwell Maltz’s book Psycho-Cybernetics. (BigMike is an avid reader. Check out his top book recommendations for business success.) Maltz discovered that if you’re in a relaxed state and consistently imagine a situation you’d like to manifest in your life, you greatly increase the chance of it becoming real. At the same time, you have to take concrete steps to achieve this goal, but the visualization plants the idea in your subconscious and it starts to grow from there.

How well does this technique work? Olympic athletes and high-achieving leaders in every industry still use his techniques to this day to create success. BigMike does it all the time. He says, “Think of it as a TV set, the picture. Make it as sharp and crystal clear as you can, and run it over and over and over in your head.”

As you practice this technique consistently and feel more confident as you see the results infiltrate your life, you can use it to fortify your successes. But the key is to act on the visualization. Chris further drives this point home: “Visualize it to the point that you can’t not take action. Like you jump out of bed every morning, because it becomes a cause bigger than you and includes you.”

One of the most mind-blowing elements of this particular episode is how all of these personal development ideas compound on one another. When you go through all of the steps outlined here and don’t take shortcuts, you are completing the steps to reinvent yourself. Toward the end of this episode, BigMike says, “I invented this guy you see in front of you. This was a transformation.” And Chris immediately follows him up by stating, “And then at every level of success, you kind of reinvent yourself.”

The Business Outlaws Share Hard-Won Insights

What makes the Business Outlaws different to any other businessman is that their insights come directly from experience. They’ve done all the necessary legwork in addition to mastering their respective industries. It’s also what makes their podcast such a valuable resource for up-and-coming leaders like you.

Here are key business insights to utilize as you build your pathway to success.

Expect And Use Failures Properly

Chris says, “In every great story of the hero’s journey, there was a big, huge failure right before the finish line. You almost have to expect that. It’s happened since the beginning of time.” There will always be setbacks in your personal and business life, but these guys know you have to keep at it.

BigMike believes determination and discipline are the elements that will see you through, and that have definitely worked for him. Jamie states very succinctly toward the end of the episode that “success is a reward, not a goal.” In other words, you have to earn it and learn from your mistakes as you continue to develop in life.

Chris explains how he goes about this: “If I fail at something, I ask, ‘What is it that I did wrong? How do I change it and try again?’ If you’re moving forward constantly, winning or losing don’t really have an effect on the end outcome.”

That second point is an important insight, because at a certain point you have to shift your approach and detach from the outcome. Chris also admits, “I’ve realized this a lot lately: People who are really successful process success and failure kind of the same.”

Learn From Other High Achievers

Speaking of successful people, BigMike and Chris say one of the best things you can do now is find a high-achieving person in your industry and talk to them because they’ve mastered their head trash. This realization has allowed them to think about their business and how to approach it differently than the average person.

Chris says, “You need to hang around more people who are super, super-high net-worth individuals because I can guarantee you, they’re going to think differently.” This difference comes from their life experience, and it can help you too to shift your game.

He goes on to say that when you meet someone famous, get over your own ego fast, then ask them how they became successful. How was their strategy different than other players? What important idea or detail did they see that no one else could?

When you take out the mind trash and start living up to your potential, what you can achieve will shift drastically. Other high achievers can give you practical insight into how to build your personal and business goals to obtain the success you deserve.

Listen To Episode 9 of Business Outlaws to Re-energize Your Life

It’s amazing how much ground is covered in this episode! BigMike, Chris and Jamie feed off each other’s energy, pushing one another to greater insights over the duration of the show. BigMike sums it up best when he says, “We’re all human. What people have to realize is, if you’re human, you can do anything as long as you have at least a normal amount of intelligence — the sky’s the limit, it really is.”

Seriously, you have to listen to this episode from start to finish, because it will cement these life-changing lessons in your mind. Share this with your friends and subscribe to Business Outlaws now to learn how to achieve your business and personal goals.

Owning all responsibility for your outcomes is the most important trait of a Great Leader.  When you choose this lonely life, you raise your hand and say, “Okay, I’m the leader. I’m the one to follow.  We rise together now, or I’ll take the fall.”

Once you decide you’re the leader and you raise your hand, now everything’s your fault.  Everybody and everything that happens below you is yours–the good, the bad–it’s yours alone.

Maybe, that was your destiny.  Or maybe, you learned that’s what it would take to get everything you always wanted…

So here I am, with Jayme Foxx and BigMike, the owner and founder of Advanced Nutrients.  In case it isn’t already obvious, BigMike smokes weed.

There may even be a budtender on hand.  Let’s call him “Screwy Louie.”

We’re having one of our usual chats.  And in case you couldn’t guess, our “usual chats” are pretty heavy.

I’m Chris Collins, founder of Syndicate X–a place where business leaders meet, and share secrets–both their pains and their successes.

Today, we’re sitting around, just talking about leadership.  And we’re digging in about the qualities of Great Leaders.

BigMike thinks Great Leaders smoke weed.  BigMike is also single. And if you would like to date him…

All right, I digress.  I wanna know what BigMike really thinks about leadership.

So I give him a quick quiz.  I wanna know if he knows: how much of leadership is born within you, and how much of leadership is learned?  I want him to guess a percentage.

BigMike guesses–almost correctly–that leadership skills are mostly acquired.  He guesses, by about 80%.

I tell him, according to Psychology Today: ⅓ of leadership is born, but ⅔ of leadership is made.

BigMike is very optimistic.  And single!

I digress…Still, it’s true that Great Leaders can be created, developed.  It starts with a little seed called seeing the world differently…the rest is shaped–and can be shaped continually–by what you’re willing to learn.

So here’s the lesson plan:

1. Leaders are Born Solo Seeds (with Unusual Growers)

BigMike shares that as a kid, from the getgo, he knew he was a little different.  Other kids didn’t understand and see the world the same way that he did. And he naturally understood human nature pretty well, for whatever reason.

Later, he came to find out that he must be wired a little differently, but he also figured out that his father had taught and encouraged him to see things in this unusual way.

Every solo seed needs a little–special–water.

For me, I never thought that I was smarter…actually, I knew I wasn’t smarter than anybody else. But I did always think that people’s priorities were mixed up, and that they weren’t paying attention to what was important.  And I’m sure being raised mostly by mom, and going through what we went through in my early years, encouraged along that different way of seeing things.

However strange we were to start, BigMike and I both–we were always listening and learning.

When Jayme was younger, she thought people were just not as creative as she was. She was always making up things or fixing things, and other kids were just like, “Oh, really?”

If you have a real strong, unique ability, you feel alone when you’re younger.  But you develop this internal dialogue. And if you’ve got a kind parent or teacher–hell, anyone–they’ll edge you into that conversation, and down your internal, individual path.

BigMike remembers having a stuffed bear he liked so damn much that it got old and ratty.  His mother worked with him on it–she bought a new one, cut it open, stuck the old one inside the new one (like a heart? Or an alien baby?), and sewed it shut. Then, he couldn’t let go of the new one–but at least it was sanitary, for a minute or two.

So what am I really saying? That leaders have to have fucked up childhoods?

No bro.  It just is what it is.  And if you’re gonna blossom into a leader, it’s probably all right.

2.   From Odd Duck to Captain–Decision Time

I got this job when I was 17 and a half, as a lot attendant in a car dealership, just to pay band rent and buy symbols and drum sticks–’cause you go through a lot of drum sticks when you hit as hard as I did on the drums.  And I came from a background where showing up on time and working hard and giving people more than they paid you for was essential. So even though I was in a band, and I had long hair, and if you saw me from across the street, you might think I didn’t have a work ethic–I worked very hard, as that lot attendant.

So, in spite of my weirdness, it didn’t take long before I was in charge of all the other lot attendants.  And then, I was anointed manager of the detailers, too. And then, they started coming to me and asking me if they could leave early.  I didn’t know how to be a mean boss yet, so all of a sudden, somehow, in my great calculation of how this was gonna work out, I was the only one there, with all these cars to pull up for the customers…

So I learned quickly I’d need to be more demanding.  Everybody in the wash rack was my friend before all this–and now, all of a sudden, I was a friend, but I was also a boss.  And I remember, very distinctly, a couple weeks in, deciding that I was gonna be the boss and do the right thing by the company, not by my friends, because it was affecting me the most.  If there wasn’t order and I didn’t have rules and I didn’t make people show up on time and stay all day and do what they were supposed to do, it made my life miserable, and it wasn’t scalable or effective.

Now, all of sudden, there was this juggle to do–I was their peer one day, and their boss the next.

That’s my first memory of understanding what leadership really was, ’cause I had to go against all of my friends and make a decision to be in charge.

So what was BigMike’s first memory of understanding leadership?

Weird bear love evolved into Cub Scouts–doing projects and having teams.

But when he was 19, he started a business called Turf Pro. He fertilized grass, like ChemLawn did, and made the grass green, killed the weeds, and killed all the fungus at the same time.  He had some friends from high school who wanted sales jobs, so BigMike gave some jobs to them.

And just like me, he quickly realized that he was now in charge–the relationships had to change.

So even though we were natural leaders, leadership was ultimately a decision.  And it was a HUGE decision, because we were betraying our friends in order to reinvent ourselves.

So you can’t really blame the people below you, or the people that are reporting to you.  Once you choose to be a leader, the ultimate outcome is your responsibility.  You have to take ownership, once and for all.

One of the things that you must do to be a Great Leader is completely own that role.  Whatever you’re leading, it’s your baby, your house.

Choosing to lead is serious business.  Like our chats, there’ nothing light about it.

3.  Dead Serious

I highly recommend Jocko’s book Extreme Ownership.  The biggest takeaway is that, in business, people die if you don’t take it seriously.  And, as a leader, owning the end result is all up to you.  So that result better be life for your business, and your people.

That’s the Navy Seal way.  But it applies to anything you might do.

Guys who are ex-athletes or in the military are often the best leaders.  They understand leadership at such a high level, because for them, life and death were truly at stake.

I was married for 13 years.  And in the end–I didn’t die, but it was almost as bad.

Satan, my ex-wife, cheated on me, and filed for divorce without me knowing–here I was, doing funny stuff with money on my end, and all kinds of crazy stuff was happening to me.

And the moral of the story isn’t, “Oh, what a bitch.”  It’s actually that the narrative I allowed would never get any better if I didn’t change it.  I would carry the same B.S. to my next relationship. And so, after I went through some pain, I said, “You know what? This is 100% my fault.” And then, things started coming to me that I had done wrong.  And in the end, I can make a pretty good case for you right now that that divorce was 100% my fault, and it wasn’t hers–as much as I like to call her “Satan.” ‘Cause I did things that contributed to her behavior–I allowed it to happen.

It’s very easy to take the path of “It’s everybody else, and I’m the victim,” but you will never be a Great Leader, and you will never become better, personally, if you don’t own the result of whatever you’re doing.  There’s very few people out there today who will own their results completely, but the key to being a GREAT entrepreneur is that everything is 100% your fault.

“Responsibility,” BigMike corrects.  I like his optimism.

He’s single, ladies.

4.   Forge the Feelings They Should Talk About

So great leaders focus intently on the outcome and the result, not the feelings and the politics of being “Right.” Politics and feelings are gonna lead you to complacency, to being average.  If you want to really achieve something, it’s the result you need to look at–not how you feel about having been wrong.

A couple years ago, I had the challenge of fixing a company that was losing about $80,000 per month. And I went in there, and I was doing my research–for over a month.  How many people do you think were talking about profit and performance in that period of time?

Well–they were all bitching at each other about who’s doing what, and complaining, and not wanting to take responsibility, because it hurt.  Their egos were in the way, and they couldn’t get to the fucking goal. Nobody was even talking about it.

They were all surprised that they were losing money.  They were all sad about it. And it’s wasn’t like the people there were stupid, or untalented.  It was that the leader there hadn’t enlisted them to move past their feelings and on to the mission at hand.

What’s everyone on your team focused on?  That’s what you have to look at, because you want people to focus on whatever is actually important.  And that comes directly from you! If you’re waking up every day, and you’re telling yourself nothing, then your whole business is probably gonna be average, or nothing.  If you’re telling yourself, “I can accomplish great things,” and you’re visualizing great things, you’ll create a culture where people are talking how they can improve the customer experience, how they can improve the bottom line–that’s the dialogue you really want.  A great leader creates an environment where you’re talking about performance, and talking about the customer experience–and not playing blame games or being bewildered or downtrodden about past results.

Let them focus on what is important, and shift that focus.  Leadership is also understanding your own brain, what motivates you.  You’re the guy, or girl, who has to get all that head-trash out of the way, clear it out, and be able to move the team forward.  You have to be sold first on anything before you can have your team sold on it. So you have to go through a process of being able to sell yourself, and understand that you have a great product or service that will help society.

It’s hard to lead yourself, lead people, and lead a business.  But to be a great leader, you need to lead all three into a winning mindset, which will become a winning strategy.

5.  Little Stuff Matters

As a leader, you’ve got to exaggerate the little details to create a winning experience.

As BigMike points out, the large strokes are expected.  But it’s the littlest things that make people go, “Wow, they thought of that!”

That’s where you’ve got them good.  Then, they go back, and they tell their friends, and they talk about you.  And that’s what you want them to do.

You want to give people such a great experience, they cannot help but share what you’ve done.

Disney World’s number one marketing strategy is word-of-mouth.  Betty from Nebraska goes there with her family and has a fantastic experience: “Wow, the streets were so clean, and everything was perfect, and the food tasted so good!” because of every little detail the park people thought of.

They keep track if someone moves a stand on a shop counter–2-3 hours after the fact, they’ll know by the change in sales traffic that the thing was moved.  And the leaders go back in, they look at the counter, and they put it back in the exact spot where business was prime. Everything is tested for maximum profitability, and the Disney Experience is run in a foolproof, replicable way.

They even have a school called the Disney Institute.  Anyone can go to it and learn the magic of paying attention to every detail.  Very few people and companies on this planet operate at that level.  But that’s what the Greatest Leaders want to achieve.

You have to embrace the challenge of that level of complexity if you want to be just that good.

As a Great Leader, you have to create a company culture that’s about outcomes.  Then, you’re a people collector, because you’re gathering the workforce who is up for that challenge.  And who’s willing to learn just as much as you are–and never to stop.

And if you’re not learning something new every day, you’re probably not paying close enough attention.

When Giuliani fixed New York, neighborhoods were able to bounce back, because they started fixing all the broken windows.

And they even started writing jaywalking tickets.  You might think, “Man, that’s anal. It’s not like those people were murdering anyone…”

But guess what?  Murders went down in Manhattan when they started writing jaywalking tickets.  I guess, in a city where they messed with jaywalkers, less people were willing to challenge the cops to a murder.

People start feeling better about the environment they’re in, and treating it with more respect.

They can see when the details are being tended to.  It shows you’re attentive to the big stuff, too.

So the littlest things do matter to a Great Leader…

You’re born a Solo Seed, and you’re watered by those willing to let you fly your freak flag.  But at some point, you’ve got to CHOOSE to be a leader. And guess what? Once you do, you don’t get to stop feeling weird and lonely.  Quite the opposite.

Then, you’ve got to get really serious.  And you have to change your own mind and feelings before you’ll change anyone else’s.  For that, it’s all in the details. Every little thing you do will have an impact on the experience of your employees and your customers, and ultimately, on your legacy.