039 – How to Overcome the Odds So You Can Achieve Your Vision and Live Your Dream
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Today, you’re going to meet my friend Jason Phillips, an entrepreneur, father, coach, and athlete that has been in and out of my Mastermind groups for over seven years. He had an amazing vision that led him to massive success.
What’s your current role right now, and how many people are you helping around the world?
I’m the CEO of IN3 Nutrition, and I am the founder of the Nutritional Coaching Institute. In IN3 we’re literally helping little more than a thousand people very month achieve their nutritional goals.
- People that want to lose 20 pounds
- UFC fighters that need to make weight for their fight
- Guys in the NBA that are rehabbing injuries right now
Let’s go back in time to 2010 when you were in our first mastermind, what were you trying to do back then and why did you struggle with that?
I was trying to get into the internet space. I was probably trying to do what I successfully do now, to be honest, but I was just really confused. I’m not trying to do what I wanted, I just knew I needed help and I struggled because I had no clarity but more importantly, I didn’t take action.
What was the mindset that held you back from that? How can everybody listening to this figure out whatever they need to change their lives? How can they overcome that resistance to action?
It was a massive scarcity mindset. I thought everyone else was better than me. I was insecure. I didn’t really believe in the process. I thought that if you took action right away results came right away and I didn’t believe that it was repeated efforts and I wasn’t seeing the fruits of my labor on day one. Typical fat loss people, right. They sign up for a fat loss program. They want to lose all the weight in seven days.
Obviously, it’s never going to happen, yet for some crazy reason, I thought it was going to happen in business.
We thought we were going to get rich overnight.
I think that we live in a world now where every market space is becoming more competitive. So you have to be more patient because you really got to get your message through. Self-awareness, understanding what your strengths are. Stop trying to be like everyone else in your market but really find a mentor and listen to every single thing that mentor says, and stop deviating.
I know what my purpose is now. I know a 100% what it is.
- I want to go out
- I want to change lives
- I want to create the right education around dietary information
I mean, don’t get me wrong. We all want to build a business but what you guys have really shown me is how do I communicate my message to the right people that ultimately will end up becoming customers.
Tell us a little bit about the mindset that allowed you to be successful there and what you might use from that mindset in your business coaching today?
I’ve always believed that I can do anything, man and I still believe that to this day. That self-belief was huge and then it was work ethic. It was every day, get a little bit better, get half percent better today. Work on my weakness and sure enough, one day I made it.
I’d love to know a little about your lowest point, as we all have in our lives.
We call it the Thanksgiving miracle…
I had left my corporate job the August before. A couple of months into being out on my own, I woke up on Thanksgiving morning with my girlfriend in Colorado. Obviously, it’s Thanksgiving Day, we’ve got to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner but first anyone that follows me knows I had to pay for Starbucks because I have the longest running Starbucks strick in the world, I promise.
I had to go get my coffee and I look at my bank account and I was overdrawn. This is a holiday, bank holiday. Money cannot be deposited, so I can’t reach out to any my friends, my family, say go put cash in so it’s available immediately. Nothing. I was literally screwed.
I could even get coffee. So, my girlfriend at that time said let’s go to the grocery store. I hadn’t even told her that I was overdrawn, freaking out. As we went to the grocery store, I pull up my bank account like my statement on my app and a $500 check had just cleared.
And so I have $400 and something dollars to deal with and I’m like, okay I can buy coffee. I can buy groceries and I could buy Thanksgiving dinner.
At that moment I knew two things. One, I was broke. Two, I never wanted to like this again.
Tell us how you went from like zero to hero over those three years.
I was relentless, man. I went home and I knew that the vehicle to success was adding value. At that point, I had been around long enough. I knew I needed to connect to the group of people that would want to consider hiring me for my services and I had to provide them with enough value to get them there.
I went home and I started adding value to everybody. I was DMing people. I was messaging how can I help you, asking the world repeatedly how can I help you. It lit up, and four months later I had already built my monthly revenue at about $8000 a month.
Was this your nutrition coaching?
This is purely nutrition coaching. One on one, not templated, not group based, not what any of the critical gurus out there told me it had to be. This was my model and again it goes back to that belief in yourself. I was like I’m abandoning what everybody says is the model and I’m going all in on value, and that was how I delivered.
The only ways to get in touch with me were to private message me on Facebook, or I listed my email address on my Instagram profile and people could find it there. That was the only two ways to get in touch with me as a lead and I just went out and tried to find ways I could distribute content to people. Just add value to their lives.
It was crazy how terrible my systems were but it was hostile. It was a relentless pursuit of getting value to people.
How much were you charging?
I started at 150. I don’t think I ever went in the space higher than 250. it wasn’t a huge jump that really boosted my revenue.
I differentiated myself in the market because it was value, I recognize that as a former eating disordered person, I basically knew that the communication was huge. I knew that there was something deeper than food and nutritional prescription. It’s about human connection. It’s about coaching. I really started branding nutritional coaching versus nutritionists.
I really coached individuals. I created connections. People really like, they sort of wanted to meet me. They were like would you come to my gym? Would you talk to people? I’m like that’s a great idea. Let me come to your gym. Let me pay my own expenses. In fact, connect me with the gym owner. I’ll offer to do a free seminar at your gym if he or she just packs it out. I’ll pay all my own stuff.
You said eating disorder, so where did that come up in your life?
At 18 I took a college scholarship for golf. But the summer between high school and college, I got injured. Just overuse injury and so I got into the rehab setting and couldn’t play golf. I had to give away my scholarship and really had a downward spiral in my life.
While I was in the rehab setting, I got approached to do some modeling. One thing led to another and I was like I need to get abs. I was told to do social and literature. I did it. It said don’t eat this, don’t eat that, never told me what to eat. Before I knew it, I was a full-blown anorexic. It was a Tuesday that I met with my pediatrician and he saw how bad it was and unbeknown to me, he and my parents were ready to have an intervention on Thursday and actually get me clinical help.
I was super close to actually going clinically anorexic but my turning point was the next day. I met somebody that actually convinced me I needed to eat and for whatever reason I put blind trust in them. Actually, she lied to me. She told me she was a nutritionist to a bodybuilder that came to the gym every day. I was like will I look like him? And she was like yeah. I do his diet. You should eat 4000 calories and so I put blind trust.
Three weeks later, I looked myself in the mirror, I’m like hey I’m not fat. That’s a good thing, not terrible and that began my recovery from anorexia.
We met, again, at the Mastermind then we had another game-changing discussion there where you were up to 70k a month and you had 10 coaches. You were doing all these events and then we started talking about the certification.
I was at this Mastermind and Craig was a guest speaker. He stuck around where we did some hot seat stuff. I brought up the idea of a certification and he was like one million percent you have to do the certification.
I left the next day. I drove. I was living in Arizona at the time we were in California, drove six hours home, walked to the door, didn’t even put my stuff away, open up my laptop and wrote the outline to my certification that day.
Talk about how the vision and values exercise in there helped you plan out the rest of the year because that was about halfway through this year?
I was in a really good place. I mean we were probably a little over six figures a month, a great place scale, and the certification was launching. Personally, I was newly married, I had a baby on the way, I new I needed to make sure that I systemize this and that I kept it all in order.
The timing was perfect. My wife was with me there. She was in the hotel room in California. I couldn’t be more excited to go home and share with her because we created a vision as to what I was going to achieve. Not what I wanted to achieve, but what I was going to achieve. We actually built out steps, right, and one of the things that, one of the exercises you challenged me to do was this perfect day vision and literally paint the picture of the day and the location.
I had never dreamed of opening a headquarters until that day. I wrote in that exercise I was going to open up a headquarters.
Talk a little about your Morning Routine.
I have to have a minimum of 60 minutes where it’s me. That means I’m up before everybody because even if I say, hey guys, leave me alone, they don’t leave me alone.
I roll out of bed in the morning and get to Starbucks and then 60 minutes of devoted me time. So, there are certain things I have to accomplish first thing in the morning. It’s not email. That’s not one of them. In fact, you’re the person that got me to move my email time to the nighttime.
Then I go through my day. I don’t even have to worry about the creative stuff because it’s done. Then I go wake my kids up, wake my wife up, take the kids to school, come home. I go work out only four times a week now max. And again, that’s because of Craig. I was finding that because of my background is fitness and I felt like I had to uphold this fitness model image because I used to be a fitness model. It was actually holding me back.
That’s literally every single day.
How do you communicate that with your spouse because I think a lot of people don’t do the communication expectations in advance?
Number one, my wife is super supportive like that. It definitely takes having the right kind of person, but I think that her being supportive comes from the conversations we’ve had and her understanding why she needs to be supportive and how she can be supportive. I think a lot of spouses want to be supportive and instead of taking a step back, they say, well, how can I help now? What can I do for you now?
My wife knows when I’m working, the only thing she can do is keep the kids away from me, and allow me to just be in my zone and do my thing. So, it really came from conversation and communication and so sharing the dream, sharing the vision, sharing everything we worked on at the workshop.
Honestly, like that front end communication is, it’s never made things difficult to do. I hands down have the most supportive wife in the world.
What about nighttime routine getting ready for the content in the morning? What do you do specifically to make sure that when you get that 60 minutes in the morning you make the most of it?
The last thing I do is check. I have a journal, actually, that my wife got me. I write in it, I write down everything that I thought about that day. I do a little bit of gratitude first. I actually, I have, in our business, we call the inner three. Like my inner strength, my inner emotion, my inner passion and I talk about what did I do physically that day to maximize myself? What did I do from a mental aspect and what actions did I take?
I write that down real quick. It puts me in a good frame of mind, then I think about all the things that are on my list that need to get done and I think about three things that I can do the next day. I keep it really simple. I don’t go above three. If it’s above three, I know it probably won’t get done and it will actually send me to a worse place.
Talk a little bit about your massive action taking, your empire thinking, always growing your dreams and expanding your thinking.
Number one: I’m always in the right network. I’m forever grateful to the coaching and the network that empire has afforded me on. I mean, like you said, I walked in and in my head I’m thinking, oh my revenue goal will be between here and there. Not even three hours later and you saw me and said dude, that’s not big enough. So that’s really cool to always be pushed outside your comfort zone.
It’s also the accountability of it. I know that if I need something I can reach out to you guys and really that’s how our coaching platform was built. Everyone’s going through what we know is a tough process. Dietary change is not easy. We all build habits dietarily growing up, and so I empathize with them. Going back to my Anorexia, I know what it’s like to have body image issues.
I know what it’s like to have a poor relationship with food. I know what it’s like to be broke as hell, but so I can empathize with you and I can tell you that there is something, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There is a skill set that even when you’re implementing it doesn’t show results right away. It will show results one day. I think that I’m able to call on my own experience, get on the same level as my clients. I feel like that’s very important and then lead them.
I think that the biggest thing I have learned in the last six months is leadership, and I think that now I’m able to lead my team and because of the way I lead them, they know how to lead their clients the same way.
Talk about how the workshop helped you build that, and who would you recommend the workshop for?
Everyone.
I’m going to invest 25 thousand dollars to have my whole team go through this workshop because I believe that my success and the rapid growth of my success in this last year is directly correlated to a lot of these principles from the Perfect Life Workshop.
I know that if I’m doing that at the very top of the business if my team is implementing that on the ground level, we’re just going to grow even faster because they’re really the ones with the direct communication to our clients and the ones that can facilitate referrals and things like that. I think that you have to know where you’re going.
Jason, where can people find out more about your nutrition coaching and where can they find you online?
For me, it’s my webpage IN3 Nutrition, and certification page. Also, please feel free to reach out to me on social media. The one thing that end every podcast is I answer every single message that’s sent to me. Obviously, I have a very devoted time to that, so if I don’t get to you that day. I will get to. It’s always me. It’s not an assistant and I love having conversations with people. So, please take me up on that.
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That was probably the most rapid-fire interview we’ve ever done, but there is so much gold in there. So, I’d love to hear what you think about today’s show and how you plan to overcome your imposter syndrome, your struggles, your limiting beliefs.
I want you to find that fire that will get you to take action and put you on the straight line to success. Keep me posted and email me at support@earlytorise.com or send me a message on Instagram or on Twitter.
Share the podcast with your friends and don’t forget to take massive action to figure out your vision, the dream for your life, and to really get passionate about what you want to do and the impact you want to have on the world and never stop learning and never, ever drop off my radar. I really need to hear from you. When you’re ready to start living your dream life, I want to see you at one of my upcoming workshops, which really, helped Jason. So, just visit Perfect Life Workshop today and fill in your application and get started and I’ll see you soon.
Hi, this is Craig Ballantyne, host of Early To Rise Radio. Have you ever wanted to become wealthier, healthier, wiser, or just have more time to appreciate the finer things in life? On this show, we reveal what high performers are doing every day to be more successful WITHOUT sacrificing their personal lives. Early To Rise Radio is sponsored by The Perfect Day Formula. Get your free copy of this game-changing success guide at FreePerfectDayBook.com.
Craig Ballantyne
If you want to double your income, work less, and become the ambitious millionaire you've always wanted to be... Craig Ballantyne is the coach who will help you do it. With more than 20-years of experience as an entrepreneur and five 7-figure businesses under his belt, he specializes in helping "struckling" entrepreneurs get out of the mud and build the business of their dreams. To see if you qualify for Craig's "Millionaire Coaching Program" send an email to support@earlytorise.com with the subject line "Millionaire".