CommitAction: Do You Know What Your Superpower Is?

Andrew: This interview is sponsored by Walker Corporate Law. Do you need a lawyer that’s not the local guy who doesn’t really get startups? Not the really expensive guys who want a piece of your business. One who really understands the start-up community and is there to help you. If you do, go to Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law.

Also sponsored by Grasshopper. Do you need a phone number where your customers can dial in, press one to go to sales, press two to go to customer service, et cetera? And maybe even all those numbers actually lead to your cell phone, but it makes you look big. If you need that kind of feature and so many others, go to grasshopper.com. Alright. Let’s get started.

Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Hey, do you know what your superpower is? Today’s guest says that his career, boom, just took right off once he discovered how to articulate his.

Peter Shallard is the shrink for entrepreneurs. Because he discovered that superpower, he’s been able to help entrepreneurs see measurable results through his private therapy practice. He also recently did CommitAction.com, a service for entrepreneurs that pairs accountability coaching with cutting edge digital productivity tools. I invented him here to talk about he did it, and to get some productivity tips from him in this interview. Peter, welcome.

Peter: Thanks for having me. I’m excited.

Andrew: Good. You were on a call where you realized that you needed to understand your superpower. What was this call that you were on?

Peter: It was not actually a call. It was a kind of funny story. It was the Australian Businesswomen’s Networking Group monthly webinar that I snuck onto. Because I had discovered Seth Godin and become a fan of his, and told one of my friends who was a member of this group. And she just calls me one day and says, oh, Seth Godin’s doing a Q and A for our businesswomen’s network. Here’s the login details.

So I was like the only guy on this webinar. I hopped on and was just listening to him talk about all this kind of stuff. And that’s when it came up. That’s when he was talking about the importance of, particularly for people who are kind of sole entrepreneurs, knowing your superpower, knowing what it is that you do, that makes you your own personal kind of Batman.

Andrew: So you understood that that’s what you needed to have, an understanding of what your superpower is. What makes you special, why other people would want to work with you. How do you go from understanding that you need that to actually figuring out what your superpower is?

Peter: Well, I guess I had known. I had never put the word superpower around it, but for years I had been trying to articulate really what it was that I did. I had all these different names. I had a background in psychotherapy, and a business doing that.

And I was like a corporate consultant, and had one of those horrible business cards that just kind of lists what you do, but no kind of name for it. So I knew I had the problem for a while. I was very familiar with that no knowledge of how to introduce myself kind of succinctly at a cocktail party.

Andrew: Yeah.

Peter: Then when he said that, I instantly realized that that was something I needed help with. And it was the webinar was like a very Q and A thing. He answered a lot of questions, and I was just, like, I have to ask him a question. Of course, stupidly, I had logged in under the name, Peter.

So while there was like hundreds of women’s name in the webinar feed of questions, this one guy pops up. And he’s like, who’s this dude, except that he noticed me and answered my question. I asked him what advice would you have for someone who’s always struggled to find their superpower?

And he said, that’s totally natural. Of course you don’t know. But your clients know, the people who love what you do the most. Like your absolute raving fans. They know, so you just need to ask them. When I left the women, it was shortly towards the end of the women, I picked up the phone. I called one of my favorite clients who was a huge fan of what I did. That was like the moment that everything changed.

Because I just picked him out. I was, like, this is a crazy question, but if I had to have a superpower, what would it be? And he just goes, uh, it’s kind of like, you’re kind of like some weird shrink for entrepreneurs. And I was just, like, boom, I’d never thought about that before. I’d never quite put those words together before, and that was the beginning of, yeah, it changed everything.

Andrew: So you just go to the person who’s excited about buying from you and you ask them, what is my superpower? Just like that?

Peter: Yeah. Basically, assuming you already have clients, or customers or whatever, the people who are like the raving fans, the people who have truly drunk the Kool-Aid. They know what your superpower is.

Andrew: All right. Let me try it right now here. In this conversation, is there someone who’s a raving fan of my work? Is there someone who’s known me for a bit who can tell me in the comments what my superpower is. Peter, I don’t know what my super power is. This is the way to do it, ask the people who are fans? I imagine anyone who’s listening to me right now is a fan. Just say, “What do you think my super power is?”

Peter: Yeah. Hopefully, that guy who’s been listening to Mixergy since the beginning who’s never missed an episode will pipe up now. If you’re listening to this and that’s you, do it. Leave a comment and tell Andrew what his super power is.

Andrew: Please.

Peter: That’s exactly how you do it, yeah.

Andrew: For someone who happens to not be on mic right now, if they want to find out what their super power is you’re saying just call one person and say, “What do you think my super power is?”

Peter: I was lucky. I got lucky that I called someone who happened to be very articulate. He was very eloquent about explaining this. Maybe you could call a couple of people. You look for this until you find something that resonates. It was in that moment…it sounds cheesy but I saw things panning out into the future. I was like “That’s what I do. That’s what I’m going to do. That’s what I’m going to biggify and focus on.” It was a cool moment.

Andrew: You’re not a person who was struggling with your business. In fact, you told Jeremy Weiss who did the pre-interview with you that you “Reached the holy grail for therapists.” What is that hourly holy grail?

Peter: I did, yeah. Such a horrible moment in my life. For a long time I was focused on running a private therapy practice. The Holy Grail for me was having a fully booked schedule, no cancellations, 40 hours of one on one time. I was doing clinical work. I got a lot of referrals back then from medical doctors. I wasn’t working with entrepreneurs. I had some entrepreneurial clients, but it was “civilians.” That’s what I call them. I did 40 hours with some people who are a little crazy and it made me a little crazy. At the end of that week I realized that what I had been striving for for a long time was not…it was one of those things where I realized I didn’t want that particular definition of success. 40 hours one on one with that type of work is incredibly exhausting, you lose your voice. I can’t even begin to explain how intense that was.

Andrew: You must be like me, talking a lot. You recognized instantly when I was panning my camera around that I have this for hot water and you asked, “Is that what you do to keep your voice from getting tired?” It does help a lot, hot water.

Peter: Before this interview I did three client consults. This will be my fourth hour on the phone chatting today. Back there I have a whole witch’s cupboard filled with concoctions and potions.

Andrew: Entrepreneurs will call you on video Skype or phone and do their session with you?

Peter: I do it all on the phone. I don’t want have to make a show every day like you do, Andrew.

Andrew: I do actually have to take a shower as much as I don’t want to because I happen to be in an office with other people who would complain if I didn’t. That’s what it is, it all happens remotely over the phone. I shouldn’t be asking this question, but I will, what kind of money can you make doing this?

Peter: That’s a great question and something I’m really passionate about. I’m super into the mission of building sustainable profitable businesses that are based on service delivery because it’s something so many people in my industry struggle with. There’s so many therapists, consultants, coaches who struggle to make it happen. That’s been my mission for years, to make it sustainable. I do a maximum of 15 hours consulting a week. It’s super high intensity and I know that beyond that I start to go a little crazy and the effectiveness starts to drop off a little bit. I do that.

That pays me a really kick ass salary. It’s somewhere just under a quarter of a million dollars a year. It’s pretty much all profit. I work out of my apartment in New York. I have played around with office in the past, but I keep coming back to creating my own space at home. There’s not a lot of overhead. It’s a really…

Andrew: What do you charge an entrepreneur per hour to work with you?

Peter: It varies on what chiropractor retainer they buy. I try not to break it down to an hourly rate. Between you, me, and your whole audience it’s about $300-350 an hour.

Andrew: The people who you were working with before…when you reach that holy grail of 40 hours a week of talking to clients, they were all over the place. Everything from an entrepreneur, you told Jeremy about a heroin addict who had a $700 a week habit. What happened with him?

Peter: He wanted to quit smoking.

Andrew: He didn’t want to quit heroin, he wanted to quit smoking cigarettes?

Peter: I kid you not.

Andrew: Let me be a therapist with you, how does that make you feel when someone comes in with that issue?

Peter: I had to fire him as a client because it was an ethical, sticky situation. I couldn’t focus on something like that. It’s also very, very, hard, in terms of the mechanics of the actual therapy, to have someone quit this little habit while they’ve got this massive thing going on. So that one was an extreme case. It’s kind of one of my funny stories that I tell people about those days. Yeah, I was working with some really weird people. My passion originally, when I started out, was to build a business just doing general therapy. Like my big thing is psychology.

I just love understanding people, so I wanted to help with phobias and anxiety disorders and addictions, and I got a lot of that type of work. There’s a handful of doctors in the city I was operating in that sent me their, kind of, worst people. Everything else has failed, but send them to this guy. See if he can do some kind of Jedi mind tricks to make him better, so. Yeah, it was intense.

Andrew: So, can you do a Jedi mind trick with someone who’s so down and out, who’s not an entrepreneur, who’s not used to being hungry for progress. Can you do something that makes them take action?

Peter: There’s a lot of stuff that works with those people, by all means, you know, therapy. There are some great solutions out there. I discovered that it requires something that, maybe, I didn’t have, like that forty hour week showed me that I’m just not the guy to do that. It has to be a calling. The reason I started working with entrepreneurs, which sort of almost happened by accident, but what kept me working with entrepreneurs, was the fact that I think people who are trying to go down that entrepreneurial journey, they do, as you say, they do have so much more motivation to change. You know, there’s an old joke amongst therapists that most people come into a therapists office not so much to change what they’re doing, but to hear conformation as to why they can’t be helped, you know. A lot of people come in, and it’s quite true, like, trying to prove that they’re the one case that will never be fixed.

Andrew: And so when someone comes to you trying to prove that you can’t do your job…

Peter: Right.

Andrew:…they can’t do their job. How do you fix that?

Peter: That’s a tricky question. The way that you fix that is, basically, by having them realize that what they’re trying to do is make the problem about you, you know, or the modality of therapy. This doesn’t work or whatever, and having them, instead, realize that the thing that’s not working isn’t the therapy, isn’t all the therapists they’ve tried and visited and the programs they’ve done, it’s them, that they are at cause for the problems in their life and the effects are around them, rather them being victimized by, like, the world, by stuff that’s happened to them.

Andrew: How do I do that? I imagine that the person listening to us right now has someone in their lives who needs to change. They need to change them. The person listening is the leader or else they wouldn’t be listening, but it’s sometimes hard even for a leader to get people to listen, and so you’re tell us what we should be doing is saying to the person we want to change, it’s not about us. It’s your fault. You’re not taking action.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew: You’re not doing what you need to do. That’s a place where they get defensive.

Peter: Right, but the thing is, is that you’re asking me these questions in the context of a therapy office, where somebody’s paid money, made an appointment, and actually showed up.

Andrew: I see, so you have a different relationship with them. They want it. They expect it from you.

Peter: Oh yeah, believe me. I went through the phase where I tried to change my friends and my family, and all the people like that, with all the cool stuff that I had learned without their consent. It just doesn’t work, and that’s something that I’ve really come to believe. It’s like a mantra that I have in my life. The only people that I offer these services to are the people who show up in front of me in a professional context. You know, nowadays, showing up in front of me means hopping on the call, booking in their sessions, they’re some entrepreneur somewhere in the world. Back then it was actually making it to my office, and if people wouldn’t do that, it’s not my responsibility to try and help them.

You know, for listeners who are wrestling with somebody, maybe, special in their lives, maybe they see is doing something to damage themselves, all you can do is be available and have that person know that if they want help, if they want help. They want leadership. They want what they can offer. You will be there when they ask for it, but they have to ask for it.

Andrew: But they have to ask for it. I see. Okay.

Peter: Right.

Andrew: Alright, that’s a good approach, actually, and it keeps us from being one of these advice spewers at people.

Peter: Oh, man.

Andrew: If you come to me, and you really want my help, then it shows an indication that you’re ready to listen to me, and at that point, we’ll talk.

Peter: Absolutely, and I’ve been that guy when I, kind of, started out. It is the worst person you can ever meet at a cocktail party. In any social scenario that person, who’s just like, has that free coaching advise for everybody, that is always available to blow people’s minds, and no one’s asking for it.

Andrew: I was at dinner with someone like that…

Peter: Yeah.

Andrew:…just ready to blow your mind. He wasn’t listening to what the other person was saying. He wasn’t just having a conversation. He was going to show him that what the solution was to break down his big problem into small steps, up, up, up. And then hold a conversation. Maybe I’ll move down to talk about the food. And All right. So you started talking to entrepreneurs.

Peter: Mm.

Andrew: And one of the first, maybe even the first entrepreneur, who came into your office, had a flying phobia.

Peter: Mm-hmm. Yeah. . . . [SS] . . .

Andrew: What was the experience like with this guy?

Peter: Yeah. So he found out about what I was doing through, I don’t know how, some of my advertising. He came in with a flying phobia and the reason that he was there . . . like the thing about phobias is that people only get rid of them when they have a need to. People will sit with phobias for lifetimes unless there’s the secondary gain in place.

So for him, his career was blowing up and he needed to fly around to different cities. Most entrepreneurs, at some point, they have to get on a plane. And so that was the problem and he was very motivated to fix it. And so, as soon as he walked into my office, I was, like, this guy’s incredible. Like he has this phobia and it’s very debilitating, but he’s so open to figuring out how we resolve it. And we did it in a single session.

Phobia cures are not a very complex process when the client’s really engaged and actually changing. And so that blew his mind. He went away. He got on planes. He had that success, and he came back and booked another session with me. And he was, like, okay, like next thing, I get a little anxious when I go up on stage to speak. It’s not a phobia, but how do I fix that? We crushed it. Then he started talking about leadership with the people on his team. We started talking about all of the other little issues where he was kind of holding himself back.

And before I knew it, I was coaching this guy on this stuff. And he kept coming back. And the thing with each week, it was like a new problem because the old one had been resolved. It was like very quick progress. And this was, like, I can’t even begin to explain what a breath of fresh air this was for me. I was, like, this guy’s incredible. He was my favorite client. It took me a while to connect up the dots but he started making referrals to his other entrepreneurial buddies. And then I found more people like him. I was, like, wow, these people are cool. These are my people.

And you’ve got to understand, back then I didn’t think of myself as an entrepreneur. I was one of those people who was, like, I’m a therapist. And the sales and marketing I have to do I was very resentful of it. It wasn’t my thing. I was focused on the psychology. You know.

Andrew: Meanwhile, now one of the first things that you did in preparation for this interview is you created CommitAction.com/Mixergy. So you’re obviously learning marketing. And we’ll talk in a moment about what’s CommitAction.com/Mixergy.

Peter: Yeah. [laughs]

Andrew: And I guess it’s one of those things we can go skip ahead and go to that site.

Peter: [??]

Andrew: So you’re with this guy. He actually starts using what you’re doing. And I’m wondering to myself, what do you do with him to get someone who’s got a phobia of flying to overcome it.

Peter: You want me to walk you through, like, a phobia cure?

Andrew: Maybe not in deep detail. But I’m curious about what the process is, especially if it’s easy and if it can be done in one session.

Peter: Okay. The thing about phobias is there’s always a stimulus response type issue. It’s very simple psychology to understand because it’s kind of a Pavlovian. You know the old story that rings the bell while the dog is looking at a steak, until eventually he can take the steak away, ring the bell, and the dog salivates.

Phobias are the same. It’s a conditioned response. So every single person with a real phobia will always have one story that they tell of how the phobia developed in graphic detail. It will almost always be below the age of seven when this happened, which is what behavioral psychologists call the imprint period which is when our brain is like a sponge. It just sucks up information and makes connections.

So every single phobic has a story about something freaky that happened in a scenario where, basically, the unconscious mind makes this learning between an external stimulus and the emotion of fear, and just connects them together. And it’s that connection that is the source of the phobia. It kind of bypasses every single other circuit in the brain. Bypasses logic. You know, everyone tells themselves, I don’t know why I’m so afraid of spiders. Like I know they’re not scary but the response is still there.

So the therapy for getting rid of phobias is, basically, going back and doing a little bit of regressive work to bring some of the resources that we have, the logical, analytical growing up resources to that memory of the past and letting go of some of the emotional baggage. So that’s kind of the broad strokes of it. That’s how it works. So . . .

Andrew: So if I had, maybe, a bad experience when I was getting on a plane as a kid . . .

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: . . . and now I’ve hooked up this bad feeling with flying.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: This is the suggestion you made. You get me to eliminate that connection . . .

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: . . . by being aware of the story that I tell myself about what happened when I was seven.

Peter: Yeah. We’ll do some kind of foo-foo visualization exercise. I’d have you go back and look at the past from a different perspective than the way you saw it at the time. I’d have you make some learnings about what happened there and about what that means for your future. I’d almost have you have a dialogue with your childhood self about what happened. Because at the time, you didn’t really understand like if you had one of these phobias. People with phobia stories are always fantastic. I had a client who had a phobia specifically of praying mantises. Not other insects, not spiders, just that. And her story was that she was walking through this garden under these willow trees brushing over her shoulder with her aunt, who had a phobia of insects.

And when she came to see me, she was, like, I think it might be genetic. I’m not sure if you can help me. You know, and did that proving the therapist wrong thing.

Andrew: Right.

Peter: And so what happened is a praying mantis fell on her shoulder, like right there. And the aunt saw it and flips the hell out. Pulls her hand out of the little girl’s hand, four-year old girl, trips over, falls on the ground. Is like blood curdling screaming, runs inside. The little girl’s alone in this garden, by herself, wondering what the hell just happened.

And, of course, her unconscious mind thinks she’s in massive danger because the biggest figure of trusted authority in the world, second to her parents, is screaming and running away from her. She looks over and there’s this praying mantis and in that moment, her unconscious mind makes that connection. Fear, praying mantis, together. And that’s stayed with her for 35 years.

Andrew: And so you help her identify that that’s the origin of this problem.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: And then how do you help break that connection?

Peter: That’s where it gets really complex. It’s a matter of going back and doing some of that woo-woo stuff. Reframing the past, looking at it from different perspectives, and basically working to kind of soothe and get rid of the emotions. And kind of creating like a confusion in the way that the unconscious mind is associating fear with that particular stimulus. So sort of just breaking down the conditioning. I’d have to do it to kind of explain it in much more detail now.

Andrew: I see what you’re saying.

Peter: Yeah.

Andrew: I don’t know, obviously, all the details of it, but I see what you’re saying. What about this? I talk to a lot of people who know they need to talk to their customers. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, recently did a post about how entrepreneurs need to get in front of their customers. Stop avoiding their customers. Get in front of them. Talk to them, or get on the phone with them, etc.

Peter: Sure.

Andrew: But a lot of us are afraid of making phone calls. We don’t have just one connection that goes back to when we were kids. We have multiple connections to it. Things like rejection that maybe comes from being rejected by friends in elementary school, to being bad entrepreneurs . . .

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: . . . to having someone call you a fraud. When you have all these connections, how do you break them?

Peter: Yeah. So what you’re talking about is like, if we were to be clinical about it, would be generalized anxiety. There’s no one stimulus that you can trace it back to.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Peter: So the solution and I’ve done this myself. It’s such a great thing on phone calls is like a big issue. Particularly for entrepreneurs that are doing direct sales. It seems very scary to pick up the phone.

The thing is is that you’re going to have a bias towards all of that negativity, towards the anxiety, if you sit down to make your phone calls in like anything less than a really peak state. So all of those memories from the past, all of the anxiety, the rejections, or whatever, they will weigh on you really heavily.

If you wake up in the morning, your general level of existential dread is pretty high. You’re kind of like depressed and you’re just like, oh, man. I’ve got to make some phone calls.

Andrew: Yes, it starts right in the morning.

Peter: Yeah. When you’re in that state, it’s almost like it can go one of two ways. It’s like which side of the bed do you get up kind of thing. If you’re in that negative state, all that negative stuff, all the demons are likely to come up. If you put yourself in a really powerful positive state, that kind of stuff, if it’s not major, if you don’t actually have like a real phobia, it’ll just disappear. You won’t even notice it.

So when I coach people to do things like cold calling and that type of ritualized phone call, scary phone call stuff, I talk to them about using their physiology. Like make all phone calls standing up. It’s like one of the worst things in the world. And by the way, big sales organizations like Fuji Xerox who do the big B2B. They’re famous for their sales training program.

They actually get rid of their chairs. They have standing desks. Because they know when they give people the little Tony Robbins’ headset and they let them move around, physiologically it’s much more difficult to be afraid and depressed. Try doing 10 jumping jacks and then being really, really upset about all the times you were rejected in the past.

Andrew: I see. So if I can get you to feel excited about making a phone call, I don’t have to worry too much about . . .

Peter: Right.

Andrew: . . . unthinking all those anxious thoughts that are connected to calls.

Peter: There’s a nuance. I think that the key is, if you get yourself to feel excited, period, about something else, and then you just make a phone call right then and there . . .

Andrew: I see.

Peter: . . . that phone call’s going to go really well, and you’re going to start breaking down that conditioning. You know what I mean?

Andrew: Yeah.

Peter: You’ll start pushing yourself in the opposite direction. I know that people aren’t going to get excited about making phone calls. But you can get excited about putting on some raging club thumping bass, listening to that. Like having a dance party, and then flicking off the music, then immediately dialing. Your voice is going to be totally different. You’re going to be in a completely different place. If you just get yourself to forget for ten seconds all of the rejection of the past, then you can make a good phone call and start building up points for positivity when it comes to common goals.

Andrew: When you started…

Peter: State management.

Andrew: When you went into this path you went into a log cabin.

Peter: Yeah.

Andrew: For how long?

Peter: I was there for four months in the southern alps of New Zealand. My nearest neighbors were miles away. They were like twinkly lights at the bottom of the valley. It was an intense period.

Andrew: Why take yourself out of society that way? What was the goal?

Peter: I was super burnt out. I had shifted at this point from the private therapy practice. I was still doing a bit of that. I was doing a lot of corporate consulting with some really big organizations on the Southeast Asia area. I’m from New Zealand, in case people haven’t realized the accent. I was living in Sydney, Australia. I was doing this crazy work. It was incredibly exhausting. I was burnt out and realized that something had to change. I had discovered The Shrink for Entrepreneurs thing and got a lot of early traction online with my terrible, shitty website. I just wanted to give it a shot. I knew that there was really something there and if I could focus on doing some of that marketing stuff that was going to make a big difference, I could change my career.

My goal was to build this location independent therapy practice so I could live in Thailand or do whatever the hell I wanted. I actually ended up in New York. It’s kind of cold for somebody who didn’t grow up here. I just knew that I needed the focus. I had the money, I was financially in a place where I could take a little sabbatical from work, so I went and locked myself away. I rented this log cabin in the alps down in the south island of New Zealand by this place called, “Wanaka.” I went skiing, that was the only thing to do there. It was the middle of winter and very snowy. I wrote, I produced content. There was one day that I wrote 8,000 words. I’ve never been able to beat that. There’s something about that log cabin. There was just nothing else to do.

Andrew: You wrote for your blog, an eBook, or in your journal?

Peter: I wrote for my blog. I wrote two eBooks. I produced all of the content I used to launch my site. I created all of the copy for my website. I worked with a design team based out of Canada, chatting with them on GChat and Skype. I just got everything set up. The mini empire I have today was created in those four months, pretty much as is. Not much has changed.

Andrew: Were you still talking to clients at the time?

Peter: I had a couple of projects I was working on, but that period was pretty low. I really cut back.

Andrew: Why couldn’t you cut back on your clients and do this from home? Say “I’m going to spend time writing 8,000 or 2,000 words” and just keep cranking this stuff out, figuring it out, and working with the design team and launching my empire. You’re smiling and I understand it, but I don’t understand why. I understand your decision, but I don’t understand why.

Peter: Why I had to go to the mountains to do all of this?

Andrew: Yeah.

Peter: I actually got rid of my house in Sydney. I had had some personal life stuff go array. I ended a long term relationship that I was in. I was burnt out. I had a bit of a quarter life crisis at that point. I put all of my furniture and what not into storage and left the country of Australia and went back to New Zealand. I didn’t have a house in New Zealand, so it would’ve been like staying friends or parents. I couldn’t even imagine trying to get stuff done in one of those environments.

Andrew: Why distance yourself completely? I know that it’s helpful because it’s helped me to do this a few times in my life. I’m looking to you to articulate it so that maybe I could help explain to other people why it was such an influence on my life when I distanced myself from society and focused on what I cared about. Why does that distance help so much?

Peter: There’s two phases we go through in relation to thinking and creating ideas, also networking with other humans and not networking. When you’re exposing yourself to all kinds of people it’s easy to pick someone’s brain, grab a coffee date. If I was working on developing a new website now that’s probably what I would do. Here in New York there’s all of these amazing entrepreneurs around the corner. When you go away to a log cabin in the middle of the mountains where you’re all by yourself it’s like you’re in this bubble. Everything you’ve spent years pouring into your head like reading, consuming content, talking to smart people all bounces around inside of that bubble and you have the opportunity to create something. Part of me when I set off on that mission was challenging myself to take everything that I knew and actually produce something out of that on my own. That’s really the value of what it was, that it was a purity of thought. Like, when I was. . . Of course, I had the Internet so I was plugged in. But when I was writing that content I wasn’t bounding ideas off of people. I rarely would spent a lot of time connecting with people on the phone or on Skype or anything. I was just really in my own head.

And so when you want to create, a bunch of entrepreneurs is a personal brand. It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever done. I wanted it to be a reflection of me. I wanted it to reflect my deepest values, and I needed it create the space in order to allow that to happen.

Andrew: Michael Ellsberg was one of the first people who you introduced to this new idea.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: What kind of feedback did he give you?

Peter: Ellsberg is a great friend of mine now. He was my client for two and a half years. He hit my site very shortly after I launched based on a guest post on Jonathan Field’s blog. He came and hit my site and immediately sent me an e-mail list, and I still have it saved. I loved this e-mail, the words he used. The minute I took this on my site I knew I had to hire him and that he went on to explain why. It was a reflection of the content I had created, the design process that I had created and that if people go and visit my site they’ll see that it is by no means minimalist. It’s like an extremely wild state with heavy, heavy design factors.

Everything about it spoke to him in a way that I knew I had to hire this guy. And so that was an incredibly validating moment. Ellsberg was a reasonably public profile. By then people kind of knew him, and I didn’t know too much about him. He signed up as a client which he is. He’s gone on to do some crazy, huge stuff. He’s published a book. He got a second book deal with Penguin which should be coming out next year some time. His career has just rocketed into the stratosphere, so it was . . . He’ll always be very dear to me because he was kind of there from the beginning.

Andrew: What’s the deal speaking of the design with the guns and bullets on your website?

Peter: On CommitAction.com?

Andrew: Yes.

Peter: Yeah. We created this cool . . . We were going to change that at some point. I originally built CommitAction so it really appealed to those on my list that had subscribed to petershallard.com for a while. The design is very similar. We just swapped out some of the little elements and put in the gun and bullets because we have this whole metaphor that our mission is to kill procrastination dead. So I think that they like the big headline that’s on the home page right now. It’s pull the trigger on procrastination. So I’m kind of at war. I’m kind of fighting a battle against procrastination. That’s what it’s all about.

Andrew: I’m wondering during this interview about your story because I think we can learn a lot about your story. For example, the way that you discovered what your mission is, what your statement about what you do is, ShrinkforEnterpreneurs. So I think we can learn a lot about your story, but I also want to spend some time talking about specific solutions to specific problems that a person listening to us is going to have. Something that they can go, “Yes, Andrea, I got something valuable about this interview, now just got to look at your beautiful face with your beard.

Peter: Let’s do it, man.

Andrew: [laughs] Procrastination, alright?

Peter: Yeah.

Andrew: Someone listening to us has a procrastination issue, tell me what can we do to kill that procrastination, something that a week from how they will go, “I don’t procrastinate because I heard Peter on Andrew’s interview.”

Peter: Okay. Cool. So we have four pillars of procrastination that I’d be working on procrastination with my clients in my own life and so I’d be working now with people at CommitActions for years. My life is just been a battle again procrastination, me and other people that I’ve been in contact with. We’ve done a bunch of research. We’ve tried a bunch of stuff out with clients. I’ve identified that there’s really four things that make a big difference that kill procrastination dead. They’re kind of the four pillars of productivity.

That’s also, we can talk about later, that’s what I want people can go check out later about this stuff. But we’ll run through real quick right now. The first one is specificity. So when people struggle with procrastination something that I think every entrepreneur goes through, the four phases of, the biggest issue is folks try and set goals without having the right kind of psychological specificity for the tasks they’re setting.

Andrew: I see. So some procrastinating may be one of the problems is. I’m not thinking enough about what I’m trying to do.

Peter: Oh, you’re too specific. It’s action, right? You can be too specific and your goals, your tasks are too granular you have 180 steps for a project that you’re trying to execute.

Andrew: Okay.

Peter: And when this happens it’s overloading. Oh my God, there’s so much to do. Then you can be not specific enough because it’s overwhelming because what you’re working on is too abstract in the big picture, and you can’t figure out what to do on Monday morning when you sit down at your desk.

Andrew: Let’s come up with an example so it’ll be a little bit more concrete what we’re talking about. Let’s suppose that I have an issue that I’m procrastinating about creating a landing page. Okay.

Peter: Right. It’s actually really common. A lot of our folks, a lot of the people we work with at Commit Action are setting goals around building their first website, or building a new website for new business or something. So, perfect example.

Andrew: Okay. And let me figure something that is anyone who has a business might want to toss up a landing page to test a new idea for their current business. Or someone who doesn’t have a business who just wants to throw a landing page out there to see if anyone’s interested in it.

Peter: Right.

Andrew: They’re going to have this need too. So, suppose I’m procrastinating. I know I need to create a landing page. I know it doesn’t take that long. But for some reason, it’s been months and months and months, and I’m still not doing it. And so you’re telling me, consider that maybe I’m being too specific or not specific enough.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Okay. So too specific would mean it has to look exactly the way I have it in my head. Not specific enough means I just have to create a landing page and I hadn’t really given much more thought than that.

Peter: I think too specific could also mean that you have a list of 100 things that you need to do, like you know that you need to get some testimonials and you need to get pictures of the people on the testimonials. And you need to figure out what fonts you’re going to use. And you need to figure out the graphic for the top of the head area. And it just goes on and on and on and on.

Andrew: I see. And then it just becomes overwhelming in both absolutes.

Peter: Absolutely.

Andrew: Either too specific or not specific enough. Alright. So that’s pillar number one.

Peter: Right.

Andrew: What’s pillar number two?

Peter: So pillar number two is measurement. So that’s the one I think a really great metaphor for, it’s not particular entrepreneurial, but it’s so universal, is weight loss. It’s the concept and this is universal with almost every task that we set ourselves, every goal.

When you make it your goal to lose ten pounds or whatever. Or you want to get in shape and get a six-pack, I don’t know. You’re going to eat healthy for like a month. Maybe three or four weeks, and nothing’s going to happen. You’re going to work out, eat healthy and there’s going to be no real physical change to your body.

Andrew: Okay.

Peter: So people like Tim Farris have gotten a lot of mileage out of this concept of being ultra-crazy, hyper-measurement about everything that you do. You know. And the reason is, like we at Commit Action really believe in that philosophy. Because when you find something to measure, anything, it can kind of be arbitrary, you create momentum. You get that positive feeling, that warm, fuzzy feeling of giving yourself that gold star.

So you can eat salads and boiled chicken for three weeks, and your body isn’t going to change that much. But if you’re keeping a food journal of all the great stuff that you’re eating, you can look back over those pages and kind of be, like, wow, I’m doing really good. I’m feeling really fantastic.

It’s the same deal for entrepreneurs who are adding B to B salespeople or who are adding leads into their customer acquisition funnel. Some companies have a six-month sales cycle. So if you make 100 cold calls at the beginning of the month, that’s not going to feel great. You’re not making any bottom line impact right yet.

But if you keep a huge list of all of the companies in that funnel, and you look at this list on a daily basis, you’re going to start to feel like there’s this momentum behind what you’re doing. Even though you’re not getting the important result, the weight loss, the bottom line dollars, whatever it is, you know, measuring something. So you don’t hit that hump like I think a lot of people do that eat healthy things and then they give up after three weeks. They’re, like, I’m sick of salads and I’m not sexy yet. You know.

Andrew: I see. So we tend to want to have a binary approach to what we’re doing. Either it’s done or not, and . . .

Peter: Right.

Andrew: . . . it’s frustrating to have it not done. For example, your eBook. You could have said, have I written the eBook or not written the eBook, that’s what’s going to decide whether I’m happy or not. And instead what you did was you focused on the number of words that you were writing. And you want us to do the same thing.

Peter: Exactly.

Andrew: Now I could see if I were going to write a book, I would count the words that I was writing every day, and that would be my indication of progress. Certain things you can’t count that well, like creating a landing page. There is no number of words that’s going to make me happy. So is it for that to just keep a journal of what I’m doing and be aware that it’s not an all or nothing thing, but it’s the progress towards a goal.

Peter: Yes, and that’s the challenge. That’s the thing about the sort of pillar of measurement is that some tasks lend themselves much easier to that type of measurement than others. And so for the ones that are difficult, I think that it’s a really smart investment of time for an entrepreneur to think creatively about, well, what can I measure here?

We can’t run through the hundreds of different tasks that different entrepreneurs do and tell them how to measure everything. But the thing is that it’s really just the gamification of whatever it is that you’re doing. And that’s what we do at Commit Action. We sort of gamify and just measure productivity itself so that people start to feel good about a track record of just following through on the commitments that they set themselves.

And so if you’re building a landing page, it’s just a matter of maybe, you lock in the ten key tasks and you make it your mission to do one of those every single week, or something like that.

Andrew: I see.

Peter: You know what I mean.

Andrew: So, all right.

Peter: You can just start feeling good about the fact that you’re following through on the thing that you decided to do. There’s a certain amount of pride and good emotion that goes with that, but if you can tap into, will keep the action moving.

Andrew: I see. So maybe step one is just going over to lead pages, the Clay Collins site, and downloading his software for creating a landing page.

Peter: Right.

Andrew: That’s step one and if I’ve done that, I don’t feel bad about not having done the whole landing page and customization and getting all the testimonies, etc. That’s just step one and I get to cross that off my list. Too specific or not specific enough. Too specific or too broad is the first pillar. Measurement is the second pillar. What’s the next one? Let’s rip through these because I also have to ask you about Commit Action.

I need to ask you some personal questions about how much revenue you’re making with that. Why anyone would want to sign up for it after you’ve been giving us all four pillars right here and some stuff on CommitAction.com/Mixergy for free. But I’ll ask about that. And where do you get off charging people 129 dollars a month? I will come back to all those things.

Peter: Okay, we will explain all that stuff. Real quickly, pillar number three is deadlines. It’s the idea that people are most productive when they are about to go on vacation. They have that flight booked on a Friday afternoon that’s the big trip to Honolulu or whatever, that’s when they get heaps of stuff done. Most entrepreneurs, in my experience, just wait around for deadlines to happen to them. They let stuff sit on their to-do list until it becomes totally urgent.

People who are members, who are real soldiers on this war on procrastination understand that if you can create deadlines and make them have a lot of gravity to them, then you’re going to be much more productive. If you’re setting a task, a goal for yourself and it doesn’t have a deadline, then it’s not going to get done. If that pillar is missing, it’ll destroy. You can have specificity, you can have measurement, if there’s no actual time deadline, it’s not going to work.

Andrew: That makes sense. And the example of a vacation is a good one because I think we’ve all had that experience where something needs to get done and we’re about to go on vacation so it’s a hard deadline, got to get it done.

Peter: I’m going on vacation the day after tomorrow. I’m so productive today, you have no idea.

Andrew: Lesson number four.

Peter: Okay, number four is accountability. That’s just having somebody that you talk to that is actually holding you to a high standard for performance. When it comes to beating procrastination in whatever area you’re focusing on. This is a really massive one for entrepreneurs because of this kind of development of the knowledge economy, the internet, it’s now possible for people like me to sit in our apartment in New York City, build a business where I’m consulting with entrepreneurs all around the world. The thing is, Andrew, is after this interview, if I slack off and just play xBox, nobody is going to tell me off.

I’m not accountable to anyone. We’ve all strove to be our own bosses. That’s like the paradox of entrepreneurship. We want the freedom, but then we realize once we get it, that if you don’t have accountability and kind of a lack of freedom to constrain you in and make you do stuff, you’re not really going to get that much stuff done. It’s like the jogging buddy principle. That’s a system that works really well and people can create accountability by creating mastermind groups. A lot of entrepreneurs who build bigger companies have advisory boards. The have shareholders. They have investors that they’re accountable to. If you’re a sole entrepreneur, you have to work harder than almost anyone else to create accountability because there isn’t anyone who’s intrinsically motivated to really give a shit about how productive you are on a day to day basis.

Andrew: Yeah. That’s one of the benefits that I have of doing interviews that I’m held accountable because you’re about to come on here whether I’m prepared or not. So I have to sit and get prepared. We also build it in within the organization where someone is dependent on me getting the interview to them. Someone else is dependent on, well everything that we do, there’s someone that’s dependent on us finishing it here.

Peter: It sound like you’ve worked hard to make accountability into the very fabric of your business.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s a real problem otherwise. Unless I have that external force, unless I have someone saying to me, like Jeremy, “Hey, there aren’t enough pre-interviews for me.” I don’t know that I’d realize that I need to get on it and find people to pre-interview.

Peter: So you can imagine how tough it must be for sole entrepreneurs where they don’t have that team bouncing that stuff backwards and forwards. That’s one of the things that we really created Commit Action to do is to really provide that accountability for people. There are other ways that we could do it. I’m not saying you have to go and do this. It’s the only way to get accountability. You can do the whole jogging buddy thing and find someone else who’s one a similar mission to you. The only problem with that is it stops working the day that you’re both hung over.

Andrew: So you’re building up at this stage in our story, you’re building up your therapy business by focusing on entrepreneurs and you’re starting to understand what to do for those entrepreneurs. And you also realizing that there’s only so many hours in the day, which is a problem that consultants kind of have. Is that why you built Commit Action?

Peter: Yeah. I built Commit Action, the personal reason is that my business is tapped out. It’s not a scale able business. The big confession is it’s not even a business. It’s a job. It’s a glorified job. It’s a sexy job. It’s location independent. It pays me a great salary. It pays for an amazing lifestyle, but it’s never going to, it’s not turning into an empire any time soon. I’m cool with that. I achieved what I wanted to achieve with it. CommitAction is something I created because I thought for a long time that I could do something with what I know about psychology to really help people beat procrastination. I didn’t want to create yet another eBook, yet another course, yet another whatever.

Because people are drowning in good ideas. Every entrepreneur that I’ve met has read so many books. They know what they should be doing. The last problem, the final frontier for entrepreneurial achievement is making yourself do the things that you know that you should.

Andrew: So how do you make people do what they need to do on your site?

Peter: CommitAction is an accountability coaching system where we actually create the four pillars every single week by phoning you up. We phone all of our clients up. We have these trained accountability ninjas. They’re coaches. They all work for me. I put them through a training program.

We phone people up and we help them create specificity. We help them measure their tasks every single week. We have a software system that does that. We help them create deadlines. There’s a natural seven-day ritual flow to it. So every single week we’re helping our clients be intentional about the goals that they’re setting.

And then, obviously, we’re providing accountability, because people know that their coach is going to call. They’re going to be asking them, hey, what did you do last week? And it works. It’s absolutely crazy. I launched this in June last year on a hunch, like I kind of cobbled this together following the kind of lean methodology. I introduced it to my list. People absolutely loved it. We had crazy customer retention. People were just voting with their wallets. Really, keeping on doing this program.

Andrew: So it happened as they say, I need to create a landing page. You tell them, or your coach says to them on a phone call, what does it mean to create a landing page?

Peter: That’s the thing is our coaches, they don’t know about your business. Whatever your niche is, they don’t know about, whatever, building landing pages or whatever you might be doing. But what they do about is accountability, so they act as this very, very honest mirror. They just reflect back at you and forces you to find the right level of specificity.

Forces you to make a commitment every single week. We make our clients make three commitments each week to three significant polls so they’re going to pick up and move forward in their life and business. That’s what it’s all about. And it works. It just gets crazy . . .[SS] . . .

Andrew: And this software. Give me an example, actually, before I get to software. Give me an example of what someone was able to do because they’re a part of this.

Peter: We had somebody who wrote in recently. I should have pulled up the testimonial before this interview. But they told us that they had been procrastinating on writing an eBook, which is, I guess, a pretty common thing amongst this crowd of folks. Like people who are trying to make stuff happen on the internet. They had never written more than 500 words, and kind of gone back to a blank page. They did CommitAction. They signed up for CommitAction. Within a month, they had written, I believe, 8,000 words.

Andrew: I see.

Peter: Like they were just, like, it’s a revolution of results for them. So that was a really cool thing. We’ve had a bunch of really cool folks write in and tell us stories of big shifts that have happened.

Andrew: And the software. What software?

Peter: It’s very simple. We have a web app. We’re always working on it. Like I said, we launched kind of the beta version of this last year. And we’re playing with it. I can tell you a little bit about the cool stuff we’ve got coming.

It’s basically a little dashboard online. You have a profile. It tracks your major milestones. How many out of those three tasks you’re achieving each week. We give our people awards, little badges, for hitting streaks in terms of productivity.

Andrew: How do you get something like that built? You’re not a developer. You’re not someone who hire, who could even cha- . . .

Peter: Ah, but I know developers.

Andrew: You do. How do you know developers?

Peter: Well, I actually used the same team who built my website to help me develop this. It’s menwithpens. They’re Canadian.

Andrew: I know menwithpens. They create beautiful eBook designs, don’t they? I know I’ve seen them somewhere.

Peter: Yeah, they actually created all of my eBook designs and stuff as well. They’re absolutely incredible.

Andrew: And they’re developers also?

Peter: Yeah. They have design development, copywriting. I can’t plug those guys enough. They changed my life. I hired them to do their most expensive build you an entire internet empire package when I first started out. It was like the one big investment I made. And, oh man, it worked out well.

Andrew: What do they charge for something like that?

Peter: A lot. It was a pretty decent chunk of money.

Andrew: What’s a lot? $20,000?

Peter: No, it was about half that. I think it was about $9,000, I’m thinking.

Andrew: And what do you get for that?

Peter: Oh, man. I can’t remember.

Andrew: Just give me a sense of it. They create your site . . .

Peter: They designed my site. They edited two eBooks. I wrote most of the content. We collaborated on content. I wrote it, the draft. They tweaked it. They polished it. They’re master wordsmiths. All of the about page content, all the static page content, they helped me put that together as well.

They do these amazing designs for eBook. They create a custom Twitter page, like backgrounds, just end to end online branding for your kind of digital home. Yeah. And for me, it’s like the design credibility. The fact that when people like Michael Ellsberg hit my site and say to me, like he instantly knew that he had to hire me. That’s a reflection of design. I’m a strong believer in the power of quality design to increase conversion with this type of thing. So it’s like instant trust. You know I judge any words that I see within, like, half a second. If it’s got some really nasty banner graphic and like the default word press [??]. I’m like, uh, this can’t be for real.

Andrew: I know what you mean.

Peter: Yeah.

Andrew: Where do you get off charging $129 a month?

Peter: Where do I get off charging that?

Andrew: [laughs] How did you end up charging that much? That’s more than most websites, what most websites, charge. I don’t know how much most websites charge. Frankly, what I’m getting at is it’s a nice number. How’d you come up with that? I was trying to ask it in a shocking way to be dramatic.

Peter: Here’s the thing. We’re trying to make people more productive. For most folks out there, and I was one of them for a long time, the shortcut to productivity is caffeine. People just drink coffee. We charge $129 a month, because that’s what most people with a pretty serious Starbucks habit spend on productivity each month in the form of caramel macchiatos. If you’re buying one hit of that from Starbucks, or your local coffee shop, a day, that’s what you’re spending a month on coffee.

Our promise for our customers is that we will make you double, five times as productive as what the caffeine is doing for you for the same money.

Andrew: Okay.

Peter: So we’re looking for people to reallocate their coffee budget, basically.

Andrew: What kind of retention have you had?

Peter: We’ve been doing this for just over a year now. When we launched, we had 96% customer retention after four months, which was something that I was massively proud of. Because I know, in the online marketing world, where a lot of people are doing these online courses and continuity programs, that there’s this three month hump that a lot of people kind of quit. They decide that they’re not going to do. Pushing beyond that and taking the vast majority of our users beyond that was a huge achievement for me.

Andrew: Talk to me about software, because I see in the comments that a lot of people are asking me to be more specific about the software that my guests are using. So what software are you using to offer your membership and to charge people and to keep track of how long they’re there?

Peter: It’s a good question. I’m going to answer it, but I’ll also tell you we’re not happy with what we built. We’re actually launching a redesign project. We’ve just signed a really cool adviser for the company, and we’re building the whole thing from scratch with our own software that’ll be like Riding Ruby on Rails. You know design development imaging.

Andrew: So even better than to see what you built the first version with . . .

Peter: Yeah.

Andrew: . . . because I think there was someone who wants this question answered.

Peter: Yeah.

Andrew: It means that what you built is more accessible.

Peter: Totally. And that’s the thing is we cobbled this together. I spent a couple of thousand dollars building this software because I don’t know how to do development. It was thesis on WordPress. We used wishlist members for our membership poll. We used a whole bunch of different plug-ins. We used PayPal for our payment portal. What else? We hacked together WordPress for our membership dashboards, so that’s totally custom code. That’s kind of the magical part that we built from scratch. That’s about it. It’s amazing.

Andrew: One other thing you do to give people badges. That’s pretty impressive. I didn’t realize that was in WordPress.

Peter: We built that from scratch as well, within WordPress.

Andrew: So it’s a plug-in you guys created yourselves.

Peter: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Andrew: All right. I like the simplicity of that. That’s basically what we’re using it here at Mixergy. What else can I ask you?

Peter: WordPress is amazing. I’ve been using it since the early days and it just blows my mind. . . [SS] . . .

Andrew: What is? WordPress?

Peter: Yeah, it just blows my mind. It’s awesome.

Andrew: I’m going to say one more time that people are probably tired of hearing me say it over and over. So is wishlist member. I love that software.

Peter: Yeah, it’s good. It’s really good.

Andrew: What about for keeping track of how long people are with you?

Peter: Right now, we just have our own kind of hacked together CRM out of spreadsheets and stuff. I’m not a huge believe in unnecessary complexity.

Andrew: You can’t tell with your own CRM when people cancel and be able to measure back what percentage of people were with you for four months.

Peter: What do you mean you can’t tell?

Andrew: How can you tell that people have been with you for four months? Is that a guesstimate?

Peter: No, not at all. We can tell. We have all of that information recorded. We can export all of the data from PayPal based on their billing history and we throw it into a spreadsheet. I actually have a team who kind of do all of that stuff for me. So it’s not all automatic. There are a lot of human-powered steps in it which is something that we had to do.

It’s an inefficiency that we built in so that we could build this all quite quickly. I didn’t want to have to implement some complex, like, I don’t know if you’ve ever walked through a salesforce.com set-up, but those kind of CRM tools tend to do thousands of different things so that they suit every customer that they could possible imagine. And we just need one or two things, so we’ll figure that out later on. We’ll have a better system at some point.

Andrew: Seth Godin helped you with your business plan?

Peter: Yeah. I had a very cool experience. He’s been, like, this pivotal kind of heroic figure in my life, because he helped me find the shrink for entrepreneurs. You know, he could barely remember that when I met him. But he found out about what we were doing with CommitAction through some kind of masterful networking. It happened kind of accidentally. And invited me to come up to his office, which is just north of New York City.

And we spent like an hour and a half, he basically blew up my ambition about what this could be. I originally created it as something cool to sell to my user base, the people who subscribe to my PeterShallard.com list. The first thing he said to me was, this could be 10,000 users in a couple of years if you play your cards right. And then basically set me down to articulate the business plan of how to get there, which is kind of different from what we’re doing, and that’s what we’re working on right now.

Andrew: How did you get him to do that? I think I missed that part.

Peter: It was basically through networking. And I can’t honestly point to any one thing that I did, but I made friends with a bunch of the right people. Somebody t- . . .

Andrew: And he did it as a favor to you, or he charges for this?

Peter: No man. This guy blows my mind. He just loves to give. It wasn’t . . .

Andrew: Yeah. He doesn’t charge for stuff like this.

Peter: No. He actually . . .

Andrew: He doesn’t offer it [??] either.

Peter: This is the funny thing. He emails me and he invited me up. And then he said, p.s., this is totally free. Like just to make it ultra-clear. And I went up and he gave me this huge plan. My mind was spinning. He basically talked at me nonstop. The guy is intense until I was at the point where I was just, like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And then he just stood up. And I was, like, oh, wow. This meeting is over. When I had had enough, when I was full up with ideas, I said to him, I was, like, wow, that is a lot of stuff to do. I mean, he was, like, yeah, like I said, it’ll take you a couple of years.

Andrew: What’s the core of his message to you?

Peter: I don’t really want to talk too much about the business plan that we haven’t yet executed on, for a lot of reasons. But the basic plan that we’re following is that we’re going to be creating a free version of CommitAction, which does a lot of the same things that our coaching program does, but people can walk themselves through it. So a kind of a freemium model. But like I said, when it comes to interviews, we don’t want to talk too much about what we haven’t done yet. You know.

Andrew: CommitAction is generating how much revenue right now?

Peter: We’re making like low five figures a month. Like I said, we just star- . . .

Andrew: What are we talking, just 10, 15,000?

Peter: Yeah, around that. We just got started. We’ve done a couple of interesting wholesale partnerships where we’ve paired up with some interesting content providers, provided accountability to their back end program. People like Amy and Dan from the foundation. They use us to provide accountability coaching while people go through the course.

Andrew: Pick you and then you give your stuff to their people.

Peter: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so they’re kind of . . .

Andrew: So what are they paying you for that?

Peter: Wholesale prices. Basically the same. We provide like a little discount for people who send us tons of customers, you know.

Andrew: What else do I want to know? I know. There was a time in your life where you were thinking about all this. And you told Jeremy, every night I would lay awake thinking I hope it will work. I hope it will work. When was this?

Peter: When I was, I think, trying to remember. I think that was when I was in the mountain buzz, in the log cabin. Like any online business, when you create the platform for whatever it is, there’s that period between something, that validating moment, when something goes viral or whatever. Like the moment when you make your first dollar online.

There were a few sleepless nights for sure. Because by moving to the mountains and doing that, I was rolling the dice and seeing if I could take my expertise from all the offline brick and mortar kind of corporate world stuff that I had done, and just build something that I’d never done before. It was scary. It was kind of freaky.

Andrew: So how do you get yourself to calm down when you’re worried that what you’re doing is going to be waste of time that maybe no one will care. Why bother writing 8,000 words if no one’s reading anything you’re writing anyway? Why even do 1,000 words. Why not just get up and feel sorry for yourself? How do you break that cycle?

Peter: I did a lot of mountain climbing. I did a lot of skiing. That’s how I find my zen. I think everybody has their thing. And when I get out there on the slopes, skiing is something I go deep in. It becomes a metaphor for me. It forces you to focus right where you are, like right in front of you. What’s one foot in front of the tips of your skis?

And so I would just go and do that. I would mentally and physically exhaust myself, and then come down and just pass out and have a great night’s sleep. Wake up in the morning and start writing again. If it was snowing outside too heavy, I’d write. If it was a nice, blue day, I’d get up on the mountain.

Andrew: Because skiing makes you feel so good, that it battles the potential depression that could come from being on your own like that.

Peter: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew: . . .[SS] . . .

Peter: And it also provides like the physical reset. Right now if I were to get overwhelmed about something, or whatever, the answer is I’ll find it in the weight room at the gym. You know what I mean. I’ll go for a run or whatever. Everyone has these little existential doubts, and most of them aren’t to be taken too seriously when you can just do a physical reset and you know and move on.

Andrew: You emailed Alex Champagne who booked you and you said Hey I got big news, I just signed Srini, is it Pillai, Pillay?

Peter: Pillay Yeah.

Andrew: Pillay MD. Who is this person? And why does it matter that you sign him up?

Peter: I’m really excited about this. It’s a massive validating moment for what we’re doing at CommitAction. You know like it’s probably become obvious rather, since you interviewed. We build something that’s really cool and people love it. But we’re just getting started. We have so many more big clients for what we are doing. The business plan that Sif[??] kind of helped me out with and Srini is going to be a part of that. He is now signed on as one of our strategic advisers to the company. Like a board of advisers type of role.

He’s a MD, he’s a psychiatrist. He’s a neuro-research expert, like internationally renowned neur- research expert. He’s the assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an invited faculty member to the Harvard Business School. CEO of a really interesting company called the neurobusiness group. And he is going to be advising us on basically how we can tweak what we are doing without coaching. How we can tweak what we are doing without software based on neuroscience insights to help fight that war on procrastination and really do something that flips a switch inside of entrepreneurs minds.

Andrew: Couldn’t you just do that yourself? You’re a therapist. You’ve got people that you can experiment with.

Peter: Totally, but I am a big believer in kind of amassing like smart people around me. I think that when you can collaborate with some of the best minds in the world on this kind of stuff, the result is going to be 10x what I could produce on my own. So, you know, that’s what, that’s what I’m trying to build a really. I really want to build the company here that, that beats the entrepreneurial procrastination problem once and for all and that’s a big [xx] [xx].You know, I’m happy that sign on other people, compatriots in that battle.

Andrew: Right. Let me do a quick plug and then I’m going to ask you about the slanting page that you created for us and this weird thing, maybe not weird, I don’t want to characterize it that way. Something that you do at party that people don’t know about you.

Peter: OK.

Andrew: First here’s the plug guys. If the part of this interview that you really like the best, if you’re listening to me and you say, the part that I really like the best is when Andrew asked about procrastination. Broke down Peter’s process and applied it to a real business and I wish he’d done more of that and less talking about his beard and less talking about the other nonsense. If that is you, I want you to know that we have something called Mixergy Premium, when in addition to giving you access to hundreds of interviews I also bring on incredible entrepreneurs to teach what they do best. And I have a process and a team and my own dogged determination to pull out the key aspects of what they do best, break it down for you and explain it to you in a way that you actually understand and use.

Now these kinds of courses if you probably looked online, there’s a course on how to create a landing page that will probably cost you hundreds of dollars. A course on how to do copy writing that would cost you thousands of dollars and so on. And all these people are going to justify it by telling you that if you get one idea it’ll be worth the thousands that you spend on their individual courses. Well that is true. But at MixergyPremium I give you all of those courses all at one low rate and you get them all and you can access them on your computer, you can get them on your iPhone, get them wherever you want, all at one price.

Why am I offering it at such a low price instead of increasing it? Because that’s the model I picked. I need the consistency of revenue to know that we’re getting a certain amount of revenue every single month and know that people are going to be happy and stay subscribe so that Alex can get paid whom you guys heard me talk about. He found Peter and booked him. Jeremy can, Jeremy’s actually such a passionate believer in this he probably wouldn’t even [xx] sometimes yes he wants to get paid. Fine. He needs to get paid something for what he’s doing and Ray and the whole team of researchers and preparers and now more and more growing to bring this to you.

That’s why I need that consistency and that’s why I’m charging such a low rate and keeping this something that you guys are going to be excited about and going to tell your friends or maybe you’ve noticed some people are so thrilled with MixergyPremium that they blogged about how excited they are. And I don’t even offer an affiliate program. So, it’s not like they’re getting some side money from me for doing it. They are just passionate about what we’re building here. Al-right. So go to mixergpremium.com, try it out. If you’re not happy with it of course I’ll give you a refund. If you still have any doubts and you say why should I give Andrew even a couple of bucks? I need even more proof. There’s a guy named Clay Collins.

I’m giving you one name of many premium members I can give you. Guy named Clay Collins I happened to mention his site earlier. You can chat with him probably on twitter. Send him an email that says is Andrew really a jerk? Is he lying? Is he stealing my money or does this all help? I believe he’ll be honest with you and tell you everything. Keep it private so that he doesn’t feel like he has to tell me anything. My expectation is that if you ask any premium member they will tell you, it’s the best few bucks they’ve ever spend. Mixergpremium.com. I guarantee it and if I cheat you out of your money Peter will kick my butt and so will all these other entrepreneurs. Isn’t that true Peter? Will you kick my butt if I lie to my audience?

Peter: Absolutely.

Andrew: Alright. There is my, actually I was doing it a little bit longer because I was on a roll. I said to myself, Peter, “Why am I dreading my own promo?” I thought, “Why my own promo?” And people will see this if they’ve watched these interviews, I dread my own promo because I’m promoting myself and I feel embarrassed to talk up my own stuff and so on and so…

Peter: We should talk about this.

Andrew: Sorry?

Peter: We should talk about this, Andrew.

Andrew: It is a problem so I would love to talk…In fact, let’s talk right now. I was going to say that I confronted it. I dealt with it and now I enjoyed it so much that I went long with it because I confronted it and enjoyed it. But what would you say to someone like me, someone maybe who’s listening in the audience who says, “I’m good at talking to people about their stuff. I stink at promoting my own things”?

Peter: I think it comes down to this interesting phenomenon known as impostor syndrome. There’s actually a lot of cool research about it. It’s a very, very common thing. And I think like the simple re frame, the 30 second fix to this is to go and learn about impostor syndrome. Just look it up. There’s a great article on my blog about it. Just Google search my name impostor syndrome. And you’ll realize that there are actually a lot of clinical, very academic studies that prove that almost everybody has this thing where they feel like they’re the one who’s faking it or they’re not really worth doing the thing or promoting themselves. We all have issues, what’s the expression? Blowing our own horn.

Andrew: Yes.

Peter: That’s the thing. And I think that as soon as you realize that you’re not the only person who still feels like you’re five years old inside and you’re just holding a bear and having conversation you don’t understand, you know. When you realize that everybody else is like that, it’s like okay I can tell these people what I do. For me that was a huge shift and for a lot of people it’s just that little re frame of, “Oh, I’m not the only one with this problem.”

Andrew: So it does help to know that you’re not the only one. We talked about the inner chatter here at Mixergy with a small group of people to see what the hell’s going on in an entrepreneur’s minds when they’re trying to do something. When they’re trying to pick up the phone. What is that inner chatter telling them? And I found that it helps to just examine it to hear your own inner chatter because you’ll realize it’s ridiculous and it starts to make it go away. The other thing we realize is if you hear other people’s inner chatter, you start to see your own foolishness in them. And it’s easy to go, “Hey, that guy’s being ridiculous by saying I don’t know what to say when I try to make a sales call. The people won’t to listen to me and so on. He’s being ridiculous and you realize oh wait, I’ve said the same things. I’m being ridiculous.” And it reduces it.

Peter: Totally.

Andrew: On to the two most important parts, actually two more things that I want to ask you about.

Peter: Oh, okay.

Andrew: This thing that you do at parties.

Peter: Right.

Andrew: You hypnotize people don’t you?

Peter: Yeah, that is my party trick.

Andrew: What do you mean you hypnotize people? Are you putting them under? Are you making them quack like ducks? What do you do?

Peter: Actually the quacks like ducks thing is kind of done to death, but the most recent one, did you interview Andy Drish? You know Andy, right?

Andrew: Andy Drish?

Peter: Yeah.

Andrew: Yes. I didn’t interview him, but I just had a cigar with him in Portland recently.

Peter: Of course you did, yeah. We were hanging out. We put together a ski vacation with a bunch of really cool entrepreneurs. Just friends of ours. We were hanging out. One night everyone is sitting around and I was like, “Okay, let’s do this.” Some of the guys had heard and they asked me to do this. What I do, my favorite thing to do is I hypnotize people. And I hypnotized Andy and Shawn Ogle and had them lay back and close their eyes and go into this trance like state where they become very suggestible. And then told them that I was giving them shots of vodka and that they were going to be able to drink them down really easily and effortlessly.

What was actually in the glasses was just water, but what’s really hilarious is that when you do this trick, if you know how to hypnotize someone, they will actually preserve it as vodka and they will get drunk. All the symptoms of a totally wasted person who’s had four or five vodka shots back to back in a row. Andy did that and spent the rest of the night pretty buzzed out. It was kind of funny. That’s my favorite party trick.

Andrew: Do you have iPhone?

Peter: I do have an iPhone.

Andrew: And you don’t have a video of this?

Peter: Oh, man. There might be a video. I don’t know. I didn’t take one. I was too busy hypnotizing, but next time I do this I will definitely hand my phone to someone else and make sure that there’s a video.

Andrew: I would love to see that. Please send it to me. I’m going to find a place on Mixergy to post it. You can post it on your site and we’ll promote it. I’ve got to see what someone who’s, I don’t want like an average person. What do you call them? Civilians. People who aren’t real serious, who aren’t real business people. I don’t want to see a civilian do it. I want to see smart entrepreneur who I already respect suddenly give in to this external thought. I think that would be really interesting.

Peter: Okay. I will seek out the most cynical kind of intellectual successful entrepreneur I can find and I will. This will be our conspiracy. It might take a while.

Andrew: Is there a place in the next month where you’re going to be? Maybe a meetup or something. Where someone from my audience can say, “I want to be on your camera. Get me drunk on water.”

Peter: Oh, man. I don’t know where the next place. In the next month or so? What’s coming up August…

Andrew: I got a better idea. Please, if you’re listening all this way to the interview, tweet at Peter and say, “Where are you, Peter?” Or, “Where can I be hypnotized by you?” Peter, if you’ve got nothing coming up, that’s fine. If you do, you can email them back. This way the answer to where will Peter be to hypnotize me will be evergreen. People can always tweet you. What’s your Twitter handle?

Peter: Just my name. @petershallard.com.

Andrew: @petershallard.com S-H-A-L-L-A-R-D. Sorry, Peter Shallard, no dot com. Alright, final thing, what is at this landing page CommitAction.com/Mixergy? What are you using to lure my audience over to give you their email addresses? It’s got to be good because these people are very skeptical.

Peter: Yeah, I’m sure these folks have heard this all before. So we have a couple of cool things. I have been working with Dr. [??], this Harvard guy, this psychiatry professor, to develop a whole bunch of really cool content about how you can create those four pillars of productivity in your own life. So we’ve created an email series that are going to go out. This is the first time I’ve ever talked about this publicly. So you guys will be first to jump on this. It’s really fantastic content all about basically how you can beat procrastination in your own life. It’s not necessarily a sales pitch for the coaching that we’re doing. People can sign up for that if they want, but there’s a lot of great, cool content.

For your audience especially we’ll give them a copy of my eBook which is the one that we’ve been talking about, when I was writing in the mountains. It seems only right. I actually took it down for sale off of my website about a year ago when I launched Commit Action. Part of my commitment to not doing passive income products, but instead making services really work in scale. The eBook is called “Demystify Your Fear: How to Smash the Last Obstacle between You and Your Business Success.” It used to be for sale for 47 dollars on my site. It’s not even available anymore, but every single person who signs up can just grab it or we’ll give them a copy for free.

Andrew: What is in this eBook? This is the four pillars that we talked about?

Peter: It’s not the four pillars. This is content that’s more…We’ll send out emails about the four pillars. “Demystify Your Fear” is really about understanding how to overcome fear. We talk about that as the last obstacle. And it provides a whole bunch of really practical psychological strategies that people can use to go away and actually do this stuff to themselves. So every time you have asked me today to explain how to fix a phobia or whatever, and I’ve sort of said, “Well, Andrew, it’s so much detail.” That is the detail in that eBook. If you want the detail, you want to be able to conquer some of your internal fears. That’s what you need to get.

Andrew: Is this it? I’m looking at my second monitor here. It’s a little dirty, but just a second. Is this it?

Peter: Heck, no. That is a free eBook on peter shallard.com.

Andrew: Okay.

Peter: People can go download that free. You can pop in. You’re welcome to do that.

Andrew: Okay.

Peter: “Demystify Your Fear”, you can’t find it on the Internet right now. It’s a secret eBook. Yeah.

Andrew: It’s just at CommitAction.com/Mixergy.

Peter: Yeah. I would love it if people would go and grab that.

Andrew: Go over and check that out largely because I would like Peter to know the power of my audience, to tell all of his friends at his next ski trip you’ve got to do an interview on Mixergy. He will ask you probing questions. You never know where he’s going to go . . . (?) but at least, people go to your website and check out your stuff. So please, guys, please go to CommitAction.com/Mixergy. And frankly beyond what it does for me I think it’s interesting to see what is it that motivating us.

How can we not keep adding more apps to our iPhones, more websites to look at, more software for our computer, but how do we upgrade our brains? How do we get our minds to do more than they can do right now? And so if you’ve got a book that we can read that will help us do that I want to check it out. So CommitAction.com/Mixergy. What were you saying as I was talking over you?

Peter: I’m not sure. I think I was making a joke about your beard.

Andrew: Ah. [laughs] I had it trimmed today. I’m not excited about the work that they did. I keep going back to this one place, and I think I need to find another hipster spot here in San Francisco.

Peter: It’s looking pretty good from here.

Andrew: Yours is looking good. I’m now wanting, guys, if you’re in San Francisco. I just moved here and you have a little bit of a beard. Other people have beards and save, “Nice beard” or comment on where did you get that shaved or it’s growing really long or I can’t get my beard like that, so this whole conversation. Now I understand why. I’m checking out your beard. Wow, that’s a really well done beard.

Peter: Yeah. I’m trying to go for the five o’clock shadow look. That’s kind of my angle.

Andrew: I like it. What about when you kiss someone? Is it a problem that it’s spikey?

Peter: My girlfriend actually digs it. So I’ve dated people in the past who were very anti facial hair, but she’s totally into it. In some ways she’s kind of responsible for this. She seems to dig that. I don’t know what that says about her. She likes a little bit of pain, I’m not sure. [laughs]

Andrew: Olivia suggested I grow the beard just like you, but she’s being spiked to death. She’s bleeding now, right now.

Peter: What were you doing right before this interview, Andrew?

Andrew: Actually I have a very strong beard. My beard is strong like a bull, my friend.

Peter: [laughs]

Andrew: Alright. CommitAction.com. Thank you all for being a part of it. Thank you, Peter, for doing this interview. Bye, guys!