Start With A Win - 5 Ways to Start 2022 With A Win

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

It’s time to kick off 2022, and Adam Contos is here to help you make it one of your best years yet! Whether you’re listening to this episode at the beginning of the year while you’re making your resolutions—or you need to hit that reset button in July—Adam’s 5 Ways to Start 2022 With A Win will give you the tools you need to take ownership of both your professional and your personal lives this year.1. Write it DownGrab a good ol’ fashioned pen and paper (don’t worry, we won’t be mad if it’s your favorite notes app), and write yourself a contract that says, “In 2022 I am going to do the following,” and make a list. Make a list of the things you want to commit to doing this year—and sign it! Be accountable to yourself. This is often scary for people, because they don’t want to fully commit to something that feels like a fleeting decision based upon their feelings. But remember: Your feelings will keep you from achieving more than not!  And in the spirit of 2022, go beyond what you think you can do and employ the plus-two mindset. Make your list of goals, and add two! You always want to be one step better than what you think you can be, but what if you were two steps better? Want to make 10 sales calls per day? What if you made 12 instead? Whether in business or exercise or relationships, those additional two add up over time!2. Learn to Love LearningMake a learning list of what you want to accomplish this year, and make a plan to make it happen. And if you actually learned to love learning, what would the results be? 3. Give What You’ve LearnedNow it’s time to put that learning into action! Take the things you’ve learned and give it to people. Look for opportunities to help other people get better by sharing what you learned. The best way to improve upon what you’ve learned is to actually put into practice.4. Create Your Stop Doing ListThis is probably the most painful one! But it’s time to get rid of the dead growth in your life. What are those things in your life that are sucking up your time, resources, and mental space? Is it a game on your phone? Grabbing a handful of chips from the pantry? Online shopping? Make this list and keep it growing, because you’ll continue to run across things.5. Take Stock of Your RelationshipsAsk yourself this question: Are the people I spend the most time with helping me become the person I want to be? Adam proposes that the people you spend time with will dictate the way your 2022 will look. So, switch your minutes to the people you want to become.Episode Links:Jessica Gunn, Gunning for Fitnesshttps://gunning4fitness.comThe Compound Effect by Darren Hardyhttps://www.amazon.com/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy/dp/159315724XOrder your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.startwithawin.com/bookConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. And happy new year. That's right. Denver, Colorado, home of Remax World Headquarters. It's Adam Cotto, CEO of Remax here. I know we said we were going to stop dancing in the new year, but there's just something about the intro. And so you can't help but bob your head and feel a little good.

It's pretty groovy, you know? That's right. It's an old word in 2020. Groovy? Maybe it's made its way back. My niece is a senior in high school and she's wearing these like bell-bottom type pants. And I was thinking when I was in high school, bell-bottoms had come back from the seventies and the nineties. And then now they're back again, 20 years later. You're like, why did I throw those away? I gotta go buy them again. So it's like, everything's groovy now, man. Yeah. We all need like these 10 year storage lots where we can just go put all our stuff in it from 10 years. Problem is you got to fit into it. Yeah. That's the big challenge, but good motivator, you know, less money spent on clothes so that you can keep the wardrobe when it comes back.

So, cause I mean, there's, I had some great flannel shirts and all these other things that I'm seeing all these kids rocking these days. I'm like, I didn't have the reprint of that Nirvana shirt. I had that Nirvana shirt. Yes. That came from the concert. So my 12 year old nephew was, uh, he's like when he was ordering up his Christmas gifts for Christmas, he goes, Hey, um, I want some eighties rock band t-shirts. So Kelly goes to target and finds like ACDC and Journey and Boston and Guns and Roses and all these things.

And I'm like, I think we had those, didn't we? Yeah. They might have been faded. The sleeves might have been cut off, but they were real. Yeah. You got them at the concert. Yes. From the band.

Yeah. Yeah. There was beer spilled all over them. You know, since it's the new year and people are tuning in, I thought that it would be appropriate for you to maybe talk about five ways that we can start 2022, which is crazy to say. Right. How do we start this year off on a great foot?

Is this a personal development podcast? I think this is a, a personal development podcast. Whoa. All right. All right. Everybody, um, before we begin our personal development podcast, how to start 2022 on the right foot or left foot, if you're left footed, that's right. Pull out a piece of paper and a pen because we're going to do this right. Okay. People are take notes. If you're, if you're left footed that's right pull out a piece of paper and a pen because we're going to do this right okay people or take notes if you're if you're using like notes on your computer some sort of recording item oh look at that mark's got his journal oh yeah i got i like that i just like writing you know yeah i did and i'm a tech guy i love putting notes and and saving notes on

my my iphone it's so convenient too a lot of times in meetings putting notes and saving notes on my iPhone. It's so convenient, too. A lot of times at meetings, I'm typing in notes because I can keep them for later. But sometimes I just like to sit down with a pen and paper and just quickly do some shorthand and come back to it and organize. Do you have a fountain pen? I do not have a fountain pen. Oh, my gosh. My birthday's in March.

You need a fountain pen, Mark. OK. Good gift idea for producer Mark is a fountain pen. I have a fountain pen. I love how it feels on the paper. Yeah. I mean, just the way it feels on the paper and the sound it makes. It's very tactile like experience. Yeah. It's not that tapping. Like when you're writing on your iPad with the stylist, like tick, tick, the stylus. Okay, let's start going here. All right. Five ways to start 2022 right.

And I started this with write it down. So I'm going to say write it down. So really, what are we talking about here? Before you do anything else, get out a piece of paper and a pen and write yourself a contract. Okay. In 2022, I am going to do the following and you're going to sign it as well. Okay. Because we're, we're making commitments here. Um, there are a lot of people that decide to do things on the new year that don't fully commit. And what happens is we haven't

made any promises to ourselves or others, because we're going to find a witness to this, folks, so that somebody can ask you, please account for what you've done. That's called being accountable. And we're going to talk about this. And this is scary for a lot of people because they don't want to fully commit. They want to be able to decide, well, is this best for me? Is this not best for me?

Whatever it might be on a fleeting basis based upon their feelings. But here's the reality. Your feelings will prevent you from achieving more than not. Right. Okay. Yeah, it doesn't feel good to wake up super early. It doesn't feel good to push yourself beyond exertion at the gym.

It doesn't feel good to make those extra calls or to have awkward conversations. Yep, exactly. And so here's what you're going to do. On that piece of paper, the first thing, the first way to start right is you're going to go beyond what you think you can do. And you're going to write plus two up there. Okay. Plus two. I used to say plus one. Now it's plus two, buddy. You just inching it every time. Just a little bit more. We're leveling up here. Okay. And I want to talk about that here in a second.

But you have to say plus two because, and I got this from a trainer that I subscribe to online. Her name is Jessica Gunn, and it's Gunning for Fitness if you want to look her up. But she has this philosophy of death plus two when you're working out. And I thought, how can I apply that to business? Because I always want to be, you know, you always want to be one step better than you thought you could be. But what if you tried to get two steps better? Because when you're exercising and you go plus two beyond what your limits are, that's where the growth occurs. That's truly where

the growth occurs. So for instance, let's say, you know, Mark, you talked about, and I'm not going to lay down business plans here. You can set your own business goals, things of that nature. But, you know, let's say you were going to call 10 clients a day. Well, what if you called 12? Okay. Because that's, by the way, that is an additional 40 a month. Okay. Wow. Yeah. You don't think about that when you, when you say, Oh, I'm just going to do two more a day. But then when you think about it and like, when you look back on it, it's like, wow, that actually adds up. Yeah. So it's an additional 500 a year for crying out loud. For some people, they don't even make 500 to begin with during a year. So this is an additional 500 a year if you take two weeks off

and you add two calls a day. It's incremental growth that compounds to really massively add up. Darren Hardy, good friend of ours, wrote the book, The Compound Effect. And it's those little extra things that add up over time because you're adding them within your system. So plus two. Now, I want you to use that in your exercise. I want you to use that in your relationships. How do you use that in your relationships, Adam?

You talk to two more people a day that are important to you, or you say, I love you two more times or two more hugs or two more handwritten notes or two more something or other, but plus two is magic. Plus two. And guess what year it is? 2022. Hey. Hey, there we go. It's all coming together. All right. All right. Let's move on to the second thing. Let's go into number two. Number two. Damn. There it is again. Okay. You hear me talk about this a lot, a lot, and it is really important. And I mean it. Simple. Small word means a lot. Learn. Okay? Learn. And learn to love learning. A lot of people are like, oh, do I have to? Do I have to take that class? What if you enjoyed doing that? What would the results be? First of all, retention, long-term memory versus short-term memory, because there's a task and then there's

truly accomplishment that we continue to put into our long-term memory, which builds our skills and makes us better at things. So learn and then put together a learning list that you want to accomplish for this year. Just for instance, I started at the end of the year. I was interested, and I'm always looking for things to learn, by the way. I was interested in how do I become a better coach? Okay. So what are the key coaching skills? So I found a 13-week coaching class that's pretty much every day for 13 weeks, you've got exercises, you're meeting with other people to do back and forth coaching and trainings on how to better understand psychology of growth and things of that nature. It costs thousands of dollars. I'm like,

worth it. Let me, I'll put this down because it's going to pay off in spades for me. You know, the, I look for the X factor in learning, you know, how many X times can you gain out of this? And, you know, additionally, it's, it's stuff that I can come back and I can help other people with. So there's a feeling of intrinsic satisfaction that occurs. But I looked at that and I thought, you know, I'm going to learn. And people are like, do you have time to at that and I thought, you know, I'm an alert and people are like, do you have time to do that? I mean, you don't have time not to do it for crying out loud. And it's one of those things where I always find that there's always more time in the day when I need there to be more time in the day. Like when I make it a priority to have more time

in my day, you know, people are always like, oh, I don't have enough time. But it's like, well, where did you find time to sit and watch, you know, YouTube for an hour? Or where did you find time to, to, um, you, you make time for things that are important and you can kind of create that time wherever it is in your day, there's going to be time, but you just have to, you know, make it. Exactly. And for people who, I mean, I've, I've got a solution for people who don't have time here pretty soon, but I want to get out of the third one. Cause so the, the first one is commit in writing. The second one is learn. And the third one is give, give. Now this is, this goes hand in hand with number two, learn, because what you should be doing is you should be taking the content that you learned and giving it to people. And I don't mean why, you know, Mark, let me teach, let me teach about coaching today. I mean, don't walk up and put it in somebody's face, but help, help

people get better with what you learn. And even if, you know, you want to say you want a sounding board or don't want a sounding board, but you have to output these things that you've learned in order to be a better teacher or better knowledge base of that information. I mean, the best way to learn something is by teaching it, right? I mean, I think we would all agree with that because if you can articulate that into your words and somebody else's ability to receive it, that's a win as a leader in order to create influence. So really take the things that you've learned and give them to people. Take and review the things that you've learned when your brain is in expansion mode. And there are certain times of the day when our brain is in expansion mode, which is, you know, that's the time when you're having all those amazing thoughts. You're like, where did that come from? And, and by the way, if you don't write them down

or type them into something, they're gone, just gone. So those are the things you give because that's truly where you find your brilliance, that sparkle that happens in your brain. And you're like, oh my gosh, I need to give that away. So that's the thing that you should go on the social media and make a video. We're big into videos here, by the way. Or a podcast or just post it on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, whatever it might be. Make a meme. Who cares?

One, write it down. What are you giving? And two, go give it. So that's the third one is give. This is magic time. Use it, please. I want to move on to number four now. And I told you there was something for all those people

who couldn't figure out when do I have time to learn. Guy, number four, create your stop doing list. Time to prune the bushes here. Get rid of all of the dead old growth that's going on in your life. Oh, this one's painful. This one's painful, Adam. Writing down all the things we need to stop doing. I can already think of a few things. There's like, oh, maybe I should delete that game off my phone because I find I kill time by playing that little game. Already, this list is already growing. Go on your screen time, buddy.

Okay. All right. What if you were reading a book or listening to a podcast or something like that instead of trying to figure out the next way to stack blocks on each other or knock down a building with a bird or something like that. Yes. All right. That's good. That's good. So stop doing.

Make this list and keep it going and growing because you're going to continue to run across things that you need to stop doing. They may be things that you say. They may be things that you do. It may be when you're bored, you walk into the pantry and grab a handful of potato chips. Those calories add up buddy over the year. 3,500 calories is a pound of fat. Okay. So when we, when we talk about the plus two, it's not two more handfuls of chips

because that also will compound on itself. Totally does. It totally does. Yeah. I mean, a handful of chips. I mean, let's just call it, um, let's just call it, uh,

150 calories. Okay. Yeah. Let's make it, let's make it around. Let's say you have a small hands, a hundred calories. Okay.

Teeny tiny hands. Tiny hands. Yeah. You, you walk in there, you grab a handful of chips, a hundred calories. Every month you're adding a pound of fat to your body.

Every month. Oh my goodness, that's too much fat. Think about that. What should we stop doing? Do you get angry easily about something? When somebody speeds up in traffic to get into your lane, do you speed up to block them? I mean, do you wave to people? I try

to wave to people when I drive to the office and you know, that's not every day anymore, but, um, you know, I, I try to wave to three people every time I drive to the office and every time I drive home from the office. Why? Kindness, delivering. So, um, some people wave with one finger. I wave with my whole hand and I smile. Those people who wave with one finger need to put that on their stop doing list. But I mean, what should you stop doing is really the big question in life. This is a big one, people, because stop doing. And I'll tell you one thing I had to stop doing this year. And I learned this from Kelly.

She's so good at this. In between sets at the gym, I would pull out my phone and she's like, are you doing sets of iPhones? I'm like, Oh, that's shaming there. Yes, I am doing sets of iPhones because your iPhone bleeds. You're supposed to only have a minute in between your sets of exercises. So your muscles have time to recover, but it was bleeding into like three or four minutes. I'm like, this is really a waste of time. So essentially what I did was I, I, I locked my iPhone in the locker and I'm like, you can't get to it. Yeah. No more sets of iPhones. So, uh, and I, I have, I have an iPad, a little iPad mini with the, the stylus and it's got my workout thing on it. It doesn't have any

other stuff. So it's, it's all about writing down my workout. And a little bit more difficult to just grab and open up Instagram and flip through. It's kind of like, yeah, totally. So, um, this is really important. Number four is stop doing all right. Number five, final one, big one here. There we go. Number five. Whoa, there it is. Relationships. And you're like, what about them? Everything happens because of your associations, folks, the people that you spend time with dictate how your year is going to turn out. Think about that. Remember when we were growing up and our parents would say, hey, be careful who you hang out with because people are going to judge you by that. Yeah.

Like, it's true, okay? Jim Rohn, great, great inspirational personal development guy said, you're the sum or you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Okay. That's right. The average of the five people you spend the most time with choose wisely. This almost comes back to the stop doing too. You know, I think about a lot of times there's toxic relationships you have, or, um, you know, there's, there's people in your life that are super negative. And so it's almost like, all right, who should I maybe spend less time with or stop talking to? And then who should I spend more time with? You know, who should I be encouraged by? Who's somebody who's more fit than I am, who's more successful at business or whatever?

Let me see if I can get more coffees with those kind of people and have, you know, better conversations. That's, that's an important part of this Mark, because there's, there's a term switch your minutes. Okay. Switch your minutes. So you take the minutes from this group of people and switch them to minutes with this group of people. So switch your minutes to the people that you want to become. So up your game. If you want to go become a better golfer, go hang out with a bunch of really good golfers and go hit golf balls with them, go golfing with them, go putting with them, things like that. If you want to get really good at business development, find some people who are very successful in this. And there's plenty of places to do this. You can just type in, you know, business masterminds in Google and the Google will tell you who to go hang out with.

That's what you need to figure out here is how do I switch my minutes from those that I don't want to have my relationships around to those that I do want to have my relationships around. And that will dictate what you are like at the end of 2022 if you consistently do that. Because it only takes three months to change a way. And that three months can change your life. So maybe your health isn't that great. Well, go find a few people that are super healthy and make friends with them. And I can tell you, you're not going to get super healthy people to start eating pizza, okay?

You know, you're going to have the super healthy people going, hey, we're going to the gym at 5 this morning. You want to go? And you'll be like, no, I can't. Yeah, you can. He's deciding not to. Oh, okay. So here's the thing. Find somebody who will help you hold yourself accountable

to the standards of the group that they're in and build your relationships around those people. And guess what? Everybody else around you will start kind of following. That's how leaders lead. They inspire change in people that makes them greater. So relationships. So let's review these five real quick. Yep. Okay? First one, write it down.

That's right. Create a contract. That's right. That's it. Add two. Second one, learn. Learn. Go learn something.

And I don't mean go watch the next Netflix series, okay? I mean go out there and find something genuine to learn and get good at it. Third one, take what you've learned and give. Give. You might learn how to make good soup. Go give it to people, okay? But go learn something and then go give it. And it's so fulfilling. Fourth one, create that stop doing list. Keep this a living document throughout the year and keep reflecting on it probably weekly. What am I going to stop doing this week?

And if you need to, if you got a lot of bad habits, maybe daily. And then the fifth one, relationships. What do you want to become? Go find people like that and hang out with them and do what they do because it will make a difference in your life. So Mark, those are five ways to start 2022 right is figure those things out and go execute on them. But nothing happens without taking action. So don't be afraid of it. Action overcomes fear. Fear stops action. So let's take action. Let's get that fear out of the way. And let's have an amazing 2022.

Fantastic. This is going to be a great year. This is going to be an amazing year for a lot of people. And I think that these five things are an awesome way to get started, get direction, and start putting yourself on the right path. And so thank you so much. Hey, guys, thanks for listening to Start With A Win. If you're ready to create personal and business success,

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