Is it Worth Investing in Self-Improvement?

Is it Worth Investing in Self-Improvement?

Sean: Here’s a follow-up question, how much is too much to pay for self-improvement? What are the factors to consider before enrolling in a high ticket course, or hiring a mentor or coach?

Toni: Interesting. Okay for me, in my experience, I’ve never paid for a coach or a mentor. I never hired one, although I do know that there are people who will accept mentees, and then there’s like a fee in exchange. But I actually allocate a portion of my income to my education fund. So on that fund, I know that, for example, if I come across a seminar, a paid talk or a course that I want to be a part of, then I just tap into that fund because I know that fund is really reserved for that purpose. So it’s a bucket that I replenish every month so that in case I come across just what I’ve said, like a mentor that I want to hire, or a course, I can just tap into that fund. So I guess it really depends on how much of your income you’re willing to budget for that. But in your case, since you are a mentor to a million already. So what do you say about that?

Sean: Actually, it’s funny because a lot of people ask if I can mentor them, but I have rules if you want me to mentor you. It’s not a lot. It’s just three rules. Number one, what did you do about what we talked about? If we had the session already, what did you do about it? Because if you don’t didn’t do anything about it, then don’t ask me to be your mentor or we can be friends, but not a mentor mentee relationship, right? Number two would be, ask me questions. Ask me your questions. So before we meet, I require you to have a list of 10, 20 questions or, you know, five questions, whatever it is you want to learn. And that’s it. And number three, would be, when do you plan to apply all of these things? So it could be like questions first. When do you plan to apply? And then the next meeting, ‘okay, what did you do?” just like that. It’s actually quite simple how I mean their people. But if that isn’t followed, then we shouldn’t be mentor-mentee.

Sean: And then I also don’t book you. Usually as the mentee, you book the mentor, you ask for the time. Before the pandemic, when I ask people for their time to mentor me in the certain area that I want to grow into. For example, I vividly remember asking David Bonifacio, he works with the Coffee Bean Group. I asked him, “Why did you sell your company to them and became part of their board? Because you could have done it your own way. You know, you could have just bootstrap, because you had to bootstrap money.” And I learned about stocks and shares and his decision and how, and why he did that and if he could do it all over again, what he would do differently. I learned a lot actually in that one hour mentorship. I told him, in just one hour, I’ll buy you lunch, let’s meet, I’ll go to you, in your office. And he said, yes, it didn’t cost me anything.

Sean: A couple of months ago, I hit the president of Santa Barley, Mr. Joey Marcello, and I had two mentorship meetings with him already. I asked him, How do you do your performance bonuses? Very big deal for me because I want to give a performance bonus to my people. But I had no idea how to compute it, I was missing so many parts of the equation that I don’t know how to piece it together. How should I really give a performance bonus, how do you compute it? I’m an idiot when it comes to that. I asked him, I learned it from him. Really good stuff.

Sean: He was gracious enough to even give me an hour and a half of his time in one session. That was really good. And then this year we’re planning to professionalize. So it’s the first time we’re considering hiring an executive, you know, an EVP, an executive vice president to join the team. I had no idea. Again, I’m an idiot when it comes to that. So I hit up the president of Ayala Land International, Ms Ana Tatlonghari. I ask her, ‘Hey, can you just give me one hour of your time?’ And she’s like, ‘Of course.’

Toni: She’s really open to it, huh?

Sean: Yeah, I spoke. I spoke at their event like three or four years ago, and she’s game and I learned a lot. And right now, we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to meld that in. So. And guys, here’s the thing: I didn’t pay anything for any of that. I didn’t pay anything. But I love these people. They know if I could be them, I would. But they didn’t ask for my money. And this is because these are people who also love helping other people. Now, nothing wrong in paying for self-improvement, having an education fund like Toni, actually, I would recommend you have that because when an opportunity comes that there’s a really, really good webinar that you could enroll in, or a really good coach or mentor that you can get might be life changing, but do your research first.

Sean: “Okay, is this person really good to be a mentor? Does he or she really have a heart to help people or just for the money?” Because there’s a lot of so-called “gurus” who are really a con-artists” So there’s a lot. I’m not going to name any. I’m just going to tell you, do your research.

Sean: And maybe you’re wondering, “but Sean you paid for your John Maxwell certification. That’s also a lot of money.” Yes, I did. And what I wanted there was the content, they have a lot of stories on there. And now I can use all of the content for my talks. The certification is nice, you know, saying that I’m a John Maxwell certified coach and speaker, that’s nice. But the content, me incorporating that in my talks, is what’s really important for me. Because I’m learning it. I’m listening to his stuff. I have read a lot of his books. I’ve been a fan since I was 13, and I’m still learning today and that stuff, if I can put it in my webinars and in my Leadership Stack lives, that’s gold. I bought something that’s a lot more valuable for me.

Toni: Actually speaking of certifications and webinars like what you said earlier, there is this master class for financial advisors by Randell Tiongson, and I saw the list of speakers, Marvin Gaye is there, Rex Mendoza, Dr. Alvin Ang, and like, as soon as I saw the enrollment phase was out. I was like, take my money. Of course you’re going to get your money’s worth, with that lineup of speakers. And I guess in your case, it’s true that you don’t need to be a mentor because usually the mentors that I, you know, ask help from, they’re quite big, right? They are already big names of the industry. So they have all the money that you could ever imagine. So I guess what you’ve said, a lot of them are willing to help people. It’s just that you have to also take the courage to step out and reach out to them.

Sean: All right. So I hope we answer that question.

Sean: Can I teach myself how to trade and rely on free content and communities online? What are the benefits of enrolling in the trading academy? I have never enrolled in one. How about you?

Toni: I have not, but I know a few content creators who started out by just watching YouTube videos, reading books, but eventually, when they started growing their community, they had to take courses. They had to join trading academies because building your credibility is part of it also. And I learned this from a client who’s also a fitness coach. I think he’s also tuned in. And he talked about how he does most of his sessions via Zoom. And why should we not just use Youtube, right? Sure, you can watch workout videos on YouTube, but when you have a coach or if you have a mentor in, let’s say, a community, you also get the accountability factor. And at the same time at least the way you learn will be personalized based on your phasing.

Toni: And I mean, yeah, sure you can do it yourself. But at the same time, it will be difficult to track your progress, right? If you have any inquiries or questions, you have Google as your friend. But you know, for me, I would say you can start with that. And then if you feel confident or if you research about the trading academy, you see the reviews, and if it’s worth it, then I’d say you should, you should try it out.

Sean: Well, I remember I’ve been to one trading course workshop. That’s Marvin Germo’s Stock Smarts. Yeah, highly recommended. I highly recommend, and everything I know about stock trading games from Marvin Germo. And the books, it’s titled Buffettology, written by his ex daughter in law, something like that. That’s a really good book as well.

Toni: Yeah, and on top of that, you can also check out Trading like a Stock Market Wizard by Mark Minervini, I hope I pronounced that right. So that’s like a Bible for traders. Everything that you want to know about chart patterns, about trading, you’ll find it in that book. So normally you start with that and then you can explore trading courses that are paid.

Sean: All right. How do I build my team, expand my brand and connect with more people? Are you rebuilding your team now, Toni?

Toni: Yes. So I have around twenty five, some that are yet to be coded. And yeah, I would love to hear that advice from you. I’m sure I’d learned a lot.

Sean: Build my team. First off, one of my biggest mistakes is I didn’t take time to screen them when I was hiring, so I hired them because I needed people. That’s a really bad reason for hiring. You should hire before you need a position filled, because the screening time should be enough for you to get to really know the person. There’s a lot of ways to hire. I recently recorded a guest in the Leadership Stack podcast on Spotify. His name is Dancho Dimkov, and he’s from Macedonia. And he’s like, “Oh, when we hire, we just get like the four or five applicants, and we get them all and we give them a project and we check, who’s going to be fit in our culture and then we just get those who are good fit and we get rid of the others.”

Sean: So I’m not saying that there’s one holy grail we need to hire, but it would really depend on what you need and what your company is like. I can’t do it the way he does because we have big accounts. We can’t like to give account A which is a very, very big mall here in the Philippines to this account manager. And then, he or she is not fit for this position, let’s just hire another one, of course, it’s going to piss the client off and we don’t want that to happen. We might lose the account. So in our case, we really take our time screening people. I guess when you’re building a team, you want people who have a certain calling deep inside them.

Sean: There are some people when you ask them, “What are you doing? Oh, I’m laying bricks on top of each other.” And then there’s some people you ask them, “What are you doing? And they’d say, Oh, I’m building a cathedral.” And then there are some people you ask them, “What are you doing? Oh, I’m building the House of God.” I want to hire that last person. Not the first one that said “I’m just laying bricks on top of one another.” And so often we hire that first person who’s just laying bricks on top of one another, that’s how he or she thinks about his job, because we don’t take the time to screen them. So for me, the first step is to take the time in hiring people.

Sean: Expanding your brand is all about consistency. So with SEO Hacker, our branding is all about quality and extra mile service. And of course, we rank number one or first page for a lot of keywords in my industry, we dominated. We have so many clients in the Philippines that are really, really good brands, big companies, and we made their brand number one, or first page. And we have proven ourselves time and again. So if you think about SEO, it’s SEO-Hacker here in the Philippines, at least we’re number one here in the country and you’re consistent with that.You don’t suddenly change your positioning and say that, “we’re number one not just in SEO, but in traditional marketing as well.” No, we don’t do that. We just say, when it comes to SEO, we’re number one. We don’t even say we’re the best in social media marketing. We’re just saying when it comes to SEO, we’re number one. That’s it.

Sean: So be consistent with your branding. A lot of lessons as well with Nike and Adidas, Nike has been the same. The swoosh logo. “Just do it” has always been the tagline. With Adidas I like their tagline, “Impossible is nothing”, but after that they changed it. I think the year after, they’re not so consistent with that. And so I don’t even know what their tagline is right now. So good branding. Be consistent.

Sean: Connecting with people is all about humility. For me, it’s all about humility, because a lot of people don’t try to connect with another person because they get shy, they feel like it’s beneath them. So when you feel like connecting with people is beneath you, then leadership is beyond you and you can’t lead. Leadership is beyond you, and you will not be able to lead when you cannot connect with people.

Sean: So it’s about being humble, knowing who you are and knowing that we are all the same, we’re just human. Whatever success we have been able to get through, at the end of the day, we’re just another human being trying to help out another human being and trying to make our way in the world. So be humble and you’ll be able to connect with everyone, I would say, everyone. No secret to that. There’s no secret to that. Those are my tips. Hopefully, that helps. It’s 9 p.m. That’s all the time. We have the night. Maybe next time we have the audio, we could go a little bit overtime again at 10:00 p.m. But tonight’s a busy night and we love that you guys are here. Hope you learned a lot tonight. I know I did from Toni. Toni, thank you so much for being here and joining me again tonight.

Toni: Of course. Thank you again for having me. Again, If you have any insights that you’d like to share, go share this live show or post your learnings on your social media platforms. Again, the links are in the description box.

Sean: All right, guys, thank you so much. We are Leadership Stack, live every 8 p.m. Thursdays and I will see you guys next week. Take care!