Read the Transcript Below:

This is The Perfect RIA, in case you didn’t know. Bringing you all the strategies to help your business grow. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? Sit back and listen in while you feel the beat. Another myth bites the dust…

Micah Shilanski:  Welcome back to another amazing episode of The Perfect RIA Podcast. I’m your cohost Micah Shilanski. And with me as usual is the legendary Matthew Jarvis. Jarvis, how’s it going, bud?

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, I’m doing good. As we’re recording this, we’re just getting ready to head off to live 2021, which we’re-

Micah Shilanski:  It’s going to be so phenomenal.

Matthew Jarvis:   … so excited for, and got to just say, I really enjoy doing these podcasts, and we’re going to talk today about head trash and about the importance of doing things that you just absolutely love. And I’ve got to say it, maybe it sounds cliche, I just absolutely love doing these podcasts. They are an absolute riot for us.

Micah Shilanski:  They are. And thank you so much to our listeners for putting up with us and going through and helping grow the podcast with it, because without you growing it, I don’t know if it would be the way it is today. So thank you, and also thank you for your feedback. We really appreciate the emails we get. If you have suggestions on things, we should cover, questions for us, things you’d like to see in the podcast incorporated, awesome, shoot us an email lifestyle@theperfectria.com is the email address, and then our team will review those and get them to us. And we appreciate it.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, Micah, well, I’m really excited for today’s episode. And this is actually a question that was posed to me at an FPA event I was presenting out a few years ago down with the Phoenix FPA, and somebody in the group says, “Matthew, I’m sure that you don’t need a coach anymore because you’re at the top of the game.” And he was being serious, by the way, this wasn’t a sarcastic or facetious, he said, “I’m sure you don’t need a coach anymore, but for those of us that do, that still have head trash, who do you recommend?” And I gave him a quick answer on it, but I was also just, for a moment, pondering this idea that somehow you’ll escape head trash someday, which in itself, by the way, I think is head trash.

Micah Shilanski:  Boy, I would love that. If someone has escaped all aspects of head trash, I would absolutely love to meet that person, and find out what they did, because this is something that, I’m going to say, still plagues me, right? It’s something I-

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah.

Micah Shilanski:  … still have to deal with on a continual basis. And I think Jarvis, the really big difference between the way our head trash is set up and someone else’s head trash, is we announced we have head trash, which could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, fair enough.

Matthew Jarvis:   Sure.

Micah Shilanski:  But we also say, this is great, what’s a plan for dealing with the head trash. And also I empower my family to call me out on the head trash too, because there’s sometimes I’ll get so stuck in my head trash that I have negative effects on my family, and they got to help call me out of it. And be like, “Man, yep. I got to fix this. This is not a good place to be.”

Matthew Jarvis:   Well, Micah, let’s take a step back real quick for our newer listeners, and what it is head trash, by the way? What does that phrase-

Micah Shilanski:  That’s a good point.

Matthew Jarvis:   … even mean? What is head trash?

Micah Shilanski:  Head trash, and there’s a couple different ways you can define it, but here’s a couple things that I think about, number one, anything that keeps me from delivering massive value to my clients. This would also be negative speak. I can’t do something. Okay, great, why can’t I do something? Everything’s legal, right? Everything’s above-

Matthew Jarvis:   Sure.

Micah Shilanski:  … board role doing all of those things that we’re supposed to, so why can’t I do something this way? If I’m putting a limitation on myself or a disbelief on myself, that is head trash and I need to curtail that and fix it.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. A quick example of that would be, “I can’t do surge meetings,” or, “I can’t delegate my email.” Well, we know that it’s physically possible to do it, by the way, these are ways to distinguish head trash from reality. So if I say, “Hey, I can’t jump off this building and live.” Yeah, that’s not head trash, that’s reality. But we look at it and say, “All right, how someone implemented surge meetings successfully?” Yes. Hundreds of listeners in The Perfect-

Micah Shilanski:  Yes.

Matthew Jarvis:   … RIA nation have. Okay. So we know that it’s possible. Great. What if I had to do it? Could I, in fact do it? And so, yeah, head trash are things that seem impossible or things that you feel like you should be doing, but you’re not anything like that.

Micah Shilanski:  Jarvis, and you said something right there that I use all the time when I’m coming up to an issue about can something can’t be done is, has anyone else been able to do this? Has at least one person being able to do it. Okay, what about two? Have two people been able to do this? Maybe one person is a one-off, maybe they’re an oddity, maybe, great, that’s the only person in the world can do this. But now all of a sudden, when two people can do something, okay, now this is no longer an oddity, now this is a repeatable pattern. Now I can do this. Now I believe in my mind, it says once two people can do something, now something is possible. So where is that? And granted, that’s my head trash thinking that two people have to do something before I can do it.

Sure, fair enough, but I got to put these in parameters that I can say, “I can move forward.” So take surge meetings, take fee increases, take delivering massive value, take delegation, not doing everything in your office, not having a shopkeeper’s mentality, all of those things that can creep into head trash in our world. Step back for a quick second and say, “Great, is there at least two people in the world that have conquered this issue? Okay, great. Yes, they have. I don’t care if they’re in our industry or not. Are there at least two people? Okay, perfect. So it is possible. Wonderful. Now how do I get there?”

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. That’s a good… I like that you highlighted fee increases. Boy, that’s a one with a lot of head trash around it.

Micah Shilanski:  Oh, yeah.

Matthew Jarvis:   I can’t raise my fees, is that right? Again, this can’t is a cue, if you’re not used to looking for head trash, can’ts shoulds, or this will happen, “If I raise my feed, this catastrophe will happen.” Those are all head trash that might happen, it is possible, in the realm of possibilities that your clients will all leave. But when you find yourself thinking that way, that’s a clear indication of head trash. You could say, this is a possible outcome, and there’s also five other possible outcomes. By the way, that’s another indication for me of head trash, when I say, “If this happens, the only outcome is this.” That’s an indication, for me, that I’m looking at head trash.

Micah Shilanski:  Jarvis, another area that is head trash, that’ll creep out there that you and I both got caught up in last week was a rant.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yes.

Micah Shilanski:  We got a message that came through that we weren’t very happy about on a public forum, and so we decided to jump on and do a podcast, and tell them who’s boss, and we went on a rant. Now, we’ve pulled this podcast, so you’re not going to see it, because, what we realized, this wasn’t till DMV this was not delivering massive value. And again, what’s the main cause or main thing we’re looking for in head trash, anything that keeps us from delivering massive value. Well negative speak, whether you’re ranting, you’re complaining, I can’t do something, that’s all negative talk, and that is a source of head trash that you need to eliminate.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yep. I think along with that would be, almost any time that you’re feeling emotions such as anger, frustration, overwhelm, annoyance, those kinds of things with your family, with your team, with your clients, usually an indication that you’re struggling with some kind of head trash, and it’s exhibiting itself in the form of… For me, confessions here, if I’ve got a head trash about what’s going on at the office, usually that exhibits itself as, what the heck does everybody here do? And why isn’t my house cleaner? Those are my things. And my family even knows like, if I’m on a cleaning rampage, all right, why don’t you go for a mountain bike ride, clear your head and let us know what’s really on your mind. And so it’s to watch those. And Micah, you mentioned this earlier, how do you empower the people around you to help you identify your head trash without giving you more head trash?

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah, exactly. These are really, really important things. Now, why does it matter? We talked about what head trash is, but Jarvis, why do these things matter? And I think the biggest part of it that we don’t think about it, and I give a lot of credit to coach Joe Lukacs on this one, he brings this comment up that says, “Our game is a PD game, a personal development game.” This is not a tax game. This is not an investment game. This is not a cashflow game. This is not a cool printer game. How fancy can your financial plan be? This is not the game we’re playing. And if you’re in that game, you’re in the wrong game. But the funny thing is, you don’t know it yet. This is a game of personal development, because the better you are as a person, the better you are as a professional, the more value you add to your clients, which is what we are solving for is DMV, delivering massive value to our clients, to our family, to our team members.

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, I think this is one of the reasons it’s so important to graduate clients who are not following your advice, graduate clients who are difficult, graduated clients who question you, because it is already so difficult to keep head trash out of our minds. Or I guess even just to manage head trash, that if you have people, especially people who are you, that are giving you more head trash, you just can’t do it. As coach Joe Lukacs says, “This is a personal development game.” You can’t allow things in your life that pull you below the line, or that pull you to this negative emotional state. It’s already hard enough to keep your head clear.

Micah Shilanski:  We talk about that and we can have a whole podcast just on graduating clients, but I used to use, or I still use the analogy, when I’m onboarding a client about how we graduate in both directions, they can totally fire us and we can totally fire them. And I jokingly say, “The reason I want to fire a client is, if I go to my desk and I look at my…” this is back when I actually got voicemails, “but when I had voicemails and that red light was on my phone and I’m rubbing my forehead,” I’m just like, “Oh man, I hope that’s not Bob calling me again.” That’s a sign that I got a head trash around that relationship and I need to fix that. So what are things that you’re dreading? What are client communications you’re dreading? What are the meetings that you’re dreading? Awesome, that’s head trash right there. You need to fix that. You can fix it by improving the relationship or graduating the relationship, but either way it must be fixed.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. And so bad relationships are a real prime source of head trash, but Micah, there’s several other things that can make you, I think, more susceptible to head trash and we can slice these both ways. What will-

Micah Shilanski:  Sure.

Matthew Jarvis:   … cause it to come on? What can help put it away? So there’s a counter to this. One that you and I discuss is what is your level of physical fitness? So the lower your physical fitness and, and again, whatever your outlet for physical fitness, that’s not really the point here, the lower your level of fitness, the more susceptible you are to head trash, AKA depression, AKA the blues, whatever you want to call that. So getting out there, for me, it’s mountain biking and CrossFitting. I know that if I do those on a regular basis, my occurrence of head trash goes way down. Does not go away, because I don’t think it ever goes away completely. It gets much better.

Micah Shilanski:  So what is that activity that you need to do? I think you need to have physical activities to help cure your head trash and also mental activities to help cure your head trash. I know one of the things… And again, with my surge schedule, I can go long breaks before meeting with clients, and in between those breaks, I can have a whole lot of head trash coming in, about how is all of this thing, how are all these spinning plates staying in the air with not me there? And so one of the easiest cures for that is, if I get in that space about doing a mini surge, calling clients, being proactive, all of a sudden in doing that engagement and making progress in something is a huge key in my mental head trash.

So physical fitness and mental progress and things. This could be project oriented. This could be client oriented. We also help other people start up businesses. It’s something I like to do on the side, in our surge time, and I get a ton of tremendous amount of value out of helping them start businesses. So these are other things that you could be doing, but what are those activities? And again, Jarvis, to your point, where is it planned? And how are you doing this proactively? As you said with CrossFit, you have a routine for doing CrossFit. You have a routine for mountain biking, and this is intentional, so you can keep doing things you want to stay ahead of your head trash.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. It’s really important to identify these in advance because when you’re in the bowels of head trash, when you’re deep in it, it does not feel like, hey, what I should go do is call right. You’re questioning your values, saying, “Man, and maybe I’m a lousy advisor. How am I delivering value? I know what I want to do. Call some clients who are going to tell me that I’m not delivering value.” That’s how the mental game works. So you kind of know ahead of time. And again, let the people around, “Hey, when I get in this funk, when I got this head trash, here are the three things I need to do. And then I’ll go back and try to objectively evaluate this.” If I’m just sitting in my head trash and I’m like, “Oh, I’m a terrible advisor,” or whatever the case would be, you’re not going to break out. Let me go talk to my five best clients and then objectively analyze this.

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely, really important. Now head trash doesn’t just limit advisors. This can happen at home. This can happen with your family. This can happen with your team members. So an important part about talking about this and identifying it, is once we identify a problem, it all of a sudden becomes pretty easily fixable. When I’m in head trash land and I don’t want to acknowledge that it’s head trash, it feels like this giant abyss that I can never get out of. But once I realized, holy crap, I have head trash around this. I just need to fix this. And it’s like 15 minutes and I can get on the other side of head trash, because I have identified it as an issue.

That’s the same thing with your team members, or if you are identifying your head trash and calling it out at the office, guess what, your team is going to be able to do that same thing. Your team is going to be able to step up, and says, “You know what? I got head trash around this.” You’re leading by example. And how much of a difference is that going to make in your team’s lives and your quality of life at the office?

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, I think this speaks to the importance of having someone in your world who can call you out on your head trash-

Micah Shilanski:  Oo, I like that.

Matthew Jarvis:   … so this can be a coach. This can be a trusted friend, someone in your mastermind. Micah, you and I do this back and forth all the time. We almost have this routine, }Oh, I can’t believe this thing happened.” And then the response back is usually like this initial, “Yeah, you’re right that really sucks. How can you take extreme ownership of this?” Because that’s perhaps one of the most powerful breakers of head trash, if you will say, “Great, I don’t feel like I’m delivering value to my clients.” Perfect. How can I take ownership? And how can I measure that? So if I was going to objectively measure the value I deliver to clients, how would I do that? And if I really think it’s below par, how can I, not my team, not my family, not anybody else, how can I fix it?

Micah Shilanski:  And it’s really important to having that non-family member call you out on that head trash. This isn’t a good spouse role. Sometimes the spouse can do it in some ways, but you need someone else, again, like in our mastermind, being able to do that. And Jarvis, when I send you those messages, when something goes wrong and I’m like ranting to you, and you come back that says, pretty much, “You’re a pansy and it’s your f-ing fault,” is pretty much the response that Jarvis gives me. And it really-

Matthew Jarvis:   Word for word, yeah.

Micah Shilanski:  … enrages me. And I’m like, “It’s not my fault.” And I get on this little rant, but then I got to say, “No, it’s really good to be called out. Yes. I need to take ownership in this. Yes. I need to fix this, and quit being a two-year-old and actually make progress.: So you really do, again, it’s big push for masterminds, you need that mastermind in this space to help push you. Because, again, what is this all about delivering massive value. And that’s a PD, that’s a personal development game.

Matthew Jarvis:   Physical fitness as a way to deter head trash, or to make it more objective. We’ve got masterminds. We’ve got coaching. I’ve also found hobbies, areas where you can easily measure success. So I mentioned mountain biking. I mentioned-

Micah Shilanski:  Yes.

Matthew Jarvis:   … dirt biking. Micah you do a lot of competitive shooting, I’ve started doing that with you as well. Areas where I can readily see improvement, so I can always just fall back and say, “Yeah, I’m feeling a lot of head trash all over the place, but I can look at this one area and kind of escape to this, see incremental improvement,” however small. Even if it’s sort of insignificant in the bigger scheme of life, it gives me some victory, some wins that I can point to and start kind of restarting my thinking.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. And you got to be careful with this one, because this is something that I fell a trap to early on in my career, is I put so much only around the business side of it, I defaulted everything to coming back to the business, and I was working 60, 70 plus hours a week in the business saying, “Well, this is where I can move the needle. This is where I can do it.” I had all the justifications in the world, but I really wasn’t stepping back to be a good father. My justification was, well, I need to make money. I need to do these things in order to pay my bills. Yeah. That’s just a justification. That’s not right for the action. The reality is, I need to do everything I need to do in 30 or less hours a week and spend more time with my family.

That’s what I needed to do, but I was using that progress metric as a way to push it into justify getting out of head trash, when I was creating other issues. So that’s one thing you really got to be careful of when we’re so goal-oriented, and Jarvis, I totally agree, we need to be able to track that progress. We also got to step back and say, “Is it progressing towards where we really want to be? Is it helping with our families? Is it helping with our time off? Is it helping with clients, et cetera?” And if it’s not hitting those top values, okay, great, that’s just going to cause more head trash later on. So make sure you’re solving the right issue.

Matthew Jarvis:   I really liked that I was in kind of debate recently on how to define advisor success, and the discussion got sidetracked on which measurement we should use. But the bigger issue is that you have measurements. So let’s use something that’s hard to measure, how good of a parent are you being? A lot of us have head trash there. I think most of us. So I try to think, all right, if I had to measure how good of a parent I’m being, and yes, I get, you cannot measure that. There’s not an exact number, but for me, I measure, how much one-on-one dedicated time do I have with each of my kids? This is one way that I measure. So I called them dad dates.

So I think, great, if I have a dad date with my kids each one each month, then I’m going to say, that’s at least checking the box in the direction of being a good dad. Does that cover everything? Certainly not, but it gives me something that when I’m having head trash around being a parent, I can look and say, “Great, am I at least doing this? Yes, I am. All right. That’s a victory. Let’s start moving my thinking to a positive direction.”

Micah Shilanski:  And I’m going to actually dial this back a little bit, saying-

Matthew Jarvis:   Please.

Micah Shilanski:  … this is how it is important on a client side as well. But before we get into that aspect of it, one of the things that I’ve had a colleague pushed back on me on, an advisor in the lower 48, I was telling her the same thing, like you and I talk about, I have scheduled time in my calendar that I need to make time for my wife. I need to make time for my kids. These are really important things. And her comment was, “Micah, that’s so ridiculous. You don’t care about your family enough that you would just not do it naturally.” And I’m like so she was-

Matthew Jarvis:   No head trash there, right? No head trash there.

Micah Shilanski:  No head trash there, whatsoever. So she was looking at my calendar and saying, “This is ridiculous that you’d have to schedule these times.” And I’m looking at my calendar, saying, “This is what I need to solve for.” And your tools are to help you accomplish your goals. So someone could look at this and say, “You shouldn’t have to book it on your calendar to do A, B, and C.” Okay. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s not, but I’m not solving for you. I’m solving for me. What do I need to do in order to be a better father, a better husband, a better advisor, and guess what? I’m calendar-oriented.

If it’s on my calendar, I can get it done. I am task-oriented. If it’s taskless processes, I can crush those things. If it’s a vague to do, I’m never going to get around to it, because I see no point in it, because there’s… And you listen to the tone of my voice, it totally sunk down, because I see no value in that. So I need clearly defined goals, and this is just me. It’s my hack to stay out of my head trash, to be a better father, to be a better husband, to be a better advisor.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yep. I think the biggest cue in there is the shoulds. Now shoulding somebody else-

Micah Shilanski:  Ooh-

Matthew Jarvis:   … let’s just set that to the side, but when you’re shoulding yourself, if I say, “Oh, I should just want to wake up in the morning and spend my entire day with my kids.” Some people by the way are wired that way. Some of you listening to this podcast, say, “Oh, that’s actually how I am.” Micah, you just said-

Micah Shilanski:  Sweet.

Matthew Jarvis:   … “Hey, I need that time blocked out.” And we could say, “Well, you should, you should not.” That’s all head trash. What system delivers the results I want? Rule number four of success, willpower is not enough. If it were, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. You wouldn’t have head trash around it.

Micah Shilanski:  Amen. I love it. So I want to dial this back a little bit to a client scenario as well, if we may-

Matthew Jarvis:   Please.

Micah Shilanski:  … and talking about measuring success. One of the things that was pretty interesting is, when we talk about measuring success, we need to be able to measure success so we can stay out of head trash. So we can go back and look to say, “Great. This is the progress that I’ve made. These are the wonderful things that I’ve done. And this is where I’m going.” Guess what? You need that same thing on a client perspective as well. So when you’re meeting with a client, how do they not have head trash about the meetings? Can you go back and can you show the value you’ve added to your clients, from when they onboard it to you, all of the things that you’ve done and helped to improve their lives? And guess what, if you cannot, well, this is where some of your head trash can come from.

So I need to track these things on a family level. I need to track these things on a top end business level, and I need to track them in a detailed client level. So I can go back and say, “Look, in our engagement in the last three years, this is the things that we’ve helped you do.” No, it is not an investment rate of return because I cannot control that. I am not going to articulate it close to how much money did they make? Well, tax savings, absolutely, value adds, absolutely, helping them with difficult situations, absolutely. These are things that I can quantify and I can have a positive impact in.

Matthew Jarvis:   I like that. Micah, as you were saying that, I was thinking about how careful are we’d articulate our client’s head trash? So that’s where we talk about the guardrails or the buckets. The clients come in, they see their accounts have gone down in value. Their head trash is saying, “I’m going to run out of money and die broke,” and then be able to articulate that in a way, “Guess what? We have a five-year buffer, so we have this time. Is that enough time?” “No, it’s not.” “Okay. How about seven years?”

So head trash is universal. It’s just part of the human condition. We’ve got to address it, I think Micah, to your point with clients, with our team, with our spouse, with ourselves. Really everywhere we go, we we’ve got to just accept the head trash, like gravity, is part of life, and we need tools to work around that or be empowered despite it.

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely. We don’t fight gravity. We accept it’s one of those laws that are there, and say, “Wonderful. Now, what do we need to do in order to help make us successful?”

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, I want to point one more thing on head trash here, and that is, I was often under the impression that people at the top of the game did not have head trash, right?

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah.

Matthew Jarvis:   When at the broker-dealer conference, they paraded across the guy doing a million dollars a year, or when you see these legends of industry, and while I have not spent any time with billionaires, I’ve spent a lot of time with tens of millionaires, 100 millionaires, however those phrases are. And when you spend a little bit time with them, they still have head trash. It might be a different flavor. It might be at a different scale, but the head trash is still there. And actually Micah, for me, that was a huge relief to see, wait a second, it’s not just me. This is just everyone. Some of us figured out how to deal with it. And we crush the world. And some of us get stuck in it and it crushes us.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. And you can see that lonely ladder of success, right? And if you don’t have a good way of dealing with your head trash, that success ladder becomes very, very lonely, because the higher you go up, the more successful you are, the less peers you have around you and what peer groups. So what are you going to do to stay on top of that head trash? There’s a whole lot of things that come inside of this. And that’s the biggest takeaway we want, I think, from this podcast, this week, is, understand that it affects every single one of us. If it doesn’t affect you, I would love to chat with you and figure out what you’ve done to figure that one out, because it absolutely affects me. Jarvis, I know in our conversations, it affects you. So it’s awesome, it’s just part of life, it’s part of gravity. Now we just need to deal with this, to still have success.

Matthew Jarvis:   Let’s do. Well, Micah, should we transition into some real specific techniques that we can use for addressing this head trash or really just straight into action items, if you’d like?

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. Let’s go straight into action items, because this podcast is all about action items. It’s all about you making progress in your practice. And of course, we all know that starts with a five-star review. So make sure you’re giving us five stars on iTunes, vote early, vote often, help this podcast grow. Then, of course, your other action items.

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, quick interjection here. Micah and I, recently, were talking to one of the top podcasting people in the industry, we had paid him for his time, and he says, “Hey, I listened to a few of your episodes, and you’re always asking people to give you five stars. You know that that makes no…. we’ve done all these measurements and it really doesn’t make a difference. It doesn’t improve anything.” And we said, “Yeah, but you know what, for our head trash, it feels really great to see some five star reviews out there. So I don’t care if it doesn’t improve our SEO, I’m just really excited to have them, it will work.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. Because one of the things I love about a live presentation, and doing live presentations, I can immediately see the feedback. I get instant gratifications in a presentation, because I can engage with the audience versus we do a podcast, great, three weeks later at airs, and we don’t see anybody listening to it. So it’s one of those things that five stars really gives us a little love back. It gives us this encouragement, solving for joy, solving for our head trash, so we can keep these things coming.

Matthew Jarvis:   Quick note, thankfully a lot of people are listening. We’re getting about 20,000 downloads a month. So thank you-

Micah Shilanski:  Awesome, thanks.

Matthew Jarvis:   … for those that left reviews. Thanks for these that listened to it, especially thank you for those that give feedback. So enough of that, Micah, what are action items specific to head trash that people can take away from this episode?

Micah Shilanski:  All right. Number one, I’m going to say, what are your top three uplifting activities that you can do that always puts you in a good state of mind? So number one, engaging with clients and delivering value. These are mine. Engaging with clients and delivering value. So sometimes, even outside of surge, I got to say, “Great. I’ve got some head trash issues. Who do I need to call? What do I need to do? How do I need to deliver value to my clients?” Maybe it’s content creation, more than likely, it’s someone else contacting me. More than likely, it’s me communicating with someone than just content creation.

Number two, where can I get out of that state of mind? So generally this is a physical activity. What physical activity, what working out can I do that, now, the rest of the world melts away and I am solely focused in that activity. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about martial arts. I enjoy about working out. I enjoy about competitive shooting because when I’m in that arena, there’s nothing else going on my mind, except for that thing right there. And it really allows me to make progress in an area and to let that go.

And then number three is, how do I measure progress on things that are important to me in my life, so I can go back and say, no, look, I actually am doing good things? Here’s my business KPIs. Here’s my family KPIs. Here’s my personal KPIs. Here’s these things that I’m doing that I actually am being successful and I’m accomplishing the goals that I set.

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, I like that. I would highlight, on the activity, it needs to be an activity that’s 100% inside of your control. So if your activity is get together with my buddies and do this, there’s a risk that when you need that most, no one will be available. And ideally it’s something you can do at the drop of a hat. So you could say, “Hey, you know what? I’m going to cut out of work early. And I’m going to go mountain biking this afternoon. I’m going to cut out of work early. I’m going to go down to the shooting range or the driving range.” And so it needs to be something that you can very quickly be done, not something where you say, for example, Micah, you and I enjoy doing masterminds together. We do them every other month or so, but that’s not going to help me in the moment where I’m struggling with head trash. That’ll help me long-term.

And next action item would be to list out, physically write down, five different items of head trash that you have. And if you can’t come up with five, then you need to come up with 10. The first one might be denying that you have head trash, but really come to terms and just know what your head trash is. We’ve mentioned some of ours on here. I have head trash around, am I delivering enough value to clients? Am I being a good enough dad? These different things, and I just need to know to be aware of them, hey, that’s my go-to head trash.

Micah Shilanski:  I like that. Last one, number three, anyways, is who’s your coach? Who’s your mastermind? This is not an internal thing. You need a resource that you can reach out to that is not family, and that is not employees, that you can go to, to talk about your head trash and to get feedback and bounce off.

Not a rant session. It’s not going in, woe is me about all this stuff in my life. That’s not the point of this, but it’s to say, “Great, I’m dealing with this. How do I need to fix that?” And when I reached out to Jarvis, again, the answer for him isn’t, “Oh my gosh, Micah, you are so wonderful. You’re doing so good in all these other areas.” No, it is not a sugar-coated answer, and he cuts right to the BS inside of it, and says, “You should step up. You need to man up and you need to fix A, B and C.” And it’s stuff that I knew, but it’s stuff that he can call me out on, which is really, really helpful to get me back on track. So who is that in your life?

Matthew Jarvis:   That person also needs to be somebody with whom you can be completely honest. And this is difficult to do. We live in kind of a lonely world, and so a mastermind person works, if you feel like you can be completely honest with that person. If you don’t have that person in your life, then a coach is great. Have them sign a non-disclosure agreement, an NDA, have your mastermind partner sign an NDA as well is actually a good plan as well.

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely.

Matthew Jarvis:   Because you can’t halfway your head trash, if you say, “Oh, I kind of have this little bit of head trash,” but it’s actually crushing you. You need to be able to say, “I’m getting crushed by this head trash. Here, let me just spell it out for you.” And they got to be able to deal with that.

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely. So, again, this podcast is all about taking action. So take these things we talked about, implement them right now. You’re listening to this on Monday morning, awesome, by the time you get done listening to this, write down those head trash items, write down what activities are you going to do to help get you out of head trash and keep that top of mind. Give that to your mastermind resource. Give that to your spouse if it’s appropriate. Give it to people around, that says, “Look, these are some identifiers that, that’s just stuff I’m dealing with, and these are the things that I’m going to need to do in order to get out of head trash, when that comes up.”

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s awesome. Micah. Well, thanks everybody for listening. And until next time happy planning.

Micah Shilanski:  Happy planning.

Hold on before we go. Something that you need to know. This isn’t tax, legal, or investment advice. That isn’t our intent. Information designed to change lives. Financial planning can make you thrive. Start today. Don’t think twice. Be a better husband, father, mother, and wife. The Perfect RIA. The Perfect RIA.