PreneurCast is a marketing + business podcast. Each week, author and marketer Pete Williams and digital media producer Dom Goucher discuss entrepreneurship, business, internet marketing and productivity.
This week, Pete and Dom discuss positive constraints — what they are and how they can help you focus, be more productive and achieve your goals.
Pete and Dom talks about how you can keep focus by using positive constraints
Transcript:
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Episode 029:
Positive Constraints
Pete Williams: D to the G, how are you mate?
Dom Goucher: Greeting and solicitations, Mr. Williams.
Pete: Oh, hello.
Dom: You did the jazzy start last time, I thought I would do one this time.
Pete: We should take it in turns, we’ll schedule it in.
Dom: I think not.
Pete: How’s the week been?
Dom: Good, good, good, I had a little bit of a challenge with the local infrastructure here otherwise known as my internet dropping out in the middle of the night last night.
Pete: That’s not fun.
Dom: It’s never fun but I learned my lesson. I learned my lesson, this time I’ve moved to the alternate location and got the hardware wired up and I’m back on line. Now, I’m going to go talk to the internet service provider. Last time, I made the mistake of talking to the internet service provider first and believing them. I was offline for a week.
Pete: Very naive, rookie mistake right there, absolute rookie mistake.
Dom: Indeed, indeed. As we were saying in a recent podcast, always have a back-up.
Pete: Absolutely.
Dom: Alright, speaking of recent podcasts and I’m keeping the trend of getting right into this. In the last one, you mentioned in a slightly off hand way, a pretty major topic… positive constraints. Now, I’m kind of getting into positive constraints but I’m finding it difficult, so I’m hoping that one, you have a bit of time to talk to us about what positive constraints are and why they are a good idea and also some tips to get good, get going, get using them.
Pete: Sure, you sounded like you had a positive constraint thrust upon you today, with the no internet.
Dom: Yeah, I’d like to call that a positive constraint but most of the words that came out of my mouth last night weren’t positive so…
Pete: Fair enough, too. I guess, as we do quite often on PreneurCast is set the context up front and give the people a frame of reference when it comes to positive constraints and define what that term is. If you go and Google positive constraints a whole bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo actually comes up. There’s nothing coming up on Google in terms of positive constraints from a success or theoretical or productivity perspective, which I found very, very interesting. So that was something I wasn’t aware of and would have thought there would be a lot more conversation being had around the topic of positive constraints because I think it is really, really important to be aware of.
So, let’s define it. Positive constraints, is obviously something positive, something good for us and it can strain, I guess is typically something that confines us and restricts us from doing certain things so, when you hear the term constraint, it is normally in a perceived with a negative connotation where are the ‘pre’ or the positive in positive constraints flips it on its head a little bit. So, to try to define it, a positive constraint is something that can constrain you in a positive way, how is that for deep?
Dom: I’m in awe of your language skills at the moment Mr. Williams.
Pete: Let’s give some examples, a positive constraint can actually be turning off your internet. Let’s hit that right now because a lot of people, when they sit down to produce something, be it writing an article for their blog, create and design new proposals templates for their quoting, maybe they are trying to sit down and work out the best copy they should put into the yellow pages advert or something like that.
So, you sit down with a goal in mind and fifteen minutes later, they are on Facebook watching a YouTube video of a cat playing on Twitter. They just get distracted so easily. So, a positive constraint, in that manner, can actually be to physically unplug your internet router so you can’t have that distraction. That is a positive constraint because you have restricted the ability to go on the internet. So it is a positive constraint in that manner.
And there are a lot of different things you can do to help you get more productive by using positive constraints. To give you another really analog example is, if you want to get fit and you need to run 10 kilometers today, an easy, positive constraint would be to get your partner to drop you 10K’s from home without keys and a phone. The only way to get home is to actually move your butt and get home. So, that is a very analog version of a positive constraint, you’ve got no other choice.
Dom: Ok, I like that one.
Pete: In terms of positive constraints, what stuff have you been playing with? Obviously you’re aware of the practice of positive constraints, what is your experience been?
Dom: The first one for me, we talked about this right at the very beginning, when we first started recording this show, we talked about my wish to have Friday afternoon’s off. That was one of my goals and what was I going to do, and so on. We haven’t really revisited that. So maybe, it is time to revisit it.
And, one of the things that I’ve done is, and it is very simplistic, I’ve just said, ‘look, I am not working between these hours of these days’ and what I actually did was cut out the middle of the day and before anybody else makes a joke about me taking siestas, it is actually the tradition in Spain to take that middle period of the day, during the summer because of the heat, and stop work. So people knock off for a couple of hours and then they work later on in the day, later than a lot of other countries do.
So, I picked that up but I made it a positive constraint by saying, I really need to focus and get a block of work done by say, 1:00. So I start at my normal time but I absolutely cut off, no internet, no phone calls, no nothing between, say, 1 and 4. And that focused me completely into getting that work done by trying to cram it into that space. Because what I’ve been doing and a lot of people do this, this is spreading out a little bit, but what I know a lot of people do is because they, say, work from home or because they have constant internet access, then they are always working, just a little bit. Oh, I’ll just check my email, because it is there. I’m connected, I’ll just check in to see what is happening here, I’ll just read a news story. And it ends up that their entire day fills up, from the second they wake up with some Facebook message on their phone, to right before they go to bed, with maybe a Twitter or more Facebook or whatever.
And, because we can work all day, sometimes we do. It doesn’t necessarily make us effective and I was finding this, I was allowing things to creep in to my spare time but was also allowing jobs to expand to fill what was perceived as the available space. So I blocked out that space and said, look absolutely no. And a couple of positive results of that, one was I’m focusing on getting work done so I’m being more productive during that space of time. But also certainly I have all this free time in the middle of the day. Yesterday, I went out for a proper menu del dia, menu of the day, which is a very traditional thing again, over here.
Pete: You are embracing that lifestyle young man.
Dom: I am embracing the lifestyle which was the whole reason of me moving here. And there was the danger of me not doing that at one point. So, yes, me and my partner, she came home for lunch yesterday and instead of us sitting down and eating the usual lunch indoors, I said hey, let’s go out for lunch. And we did because I blocked that time out, I knew it was available and I refused to work. It is not one of the deeper examples of a positive constraint but it is one that I’m working with right now. It is definitely having positive results for me.
Pete: Fantastic, absolutely fantastic. That is what it is all about, putting rules and things in place to actually keep you focused on what you need to do. We spoke about the Pomodoro Technique on the podcast previously. For those who are new, welcome to the podcast. And the Pomodoro Technique is all about getting a timer for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever you can invest and say, ‘I’m going to do this one task until this timer goes off.’
And you can get the good old egg timer or a timer to sit on your desk and there are plenty of applications. Focus Booster is a great little application that I think is multi platform. So it will work on your Mac and your PC. And you can turn it on with a 20 minute timeframe. It will countdown and then once 20 minutes is up, it will send you a little bell so you can then go off and spend five minutes of YouTube time before you come back and do another Pomodoro.
There are applications as well that you can put on your Windows operating system or your Mac as well, that will disconnect your internet browsing for a certain period of time. So you can say ‘I don’t want to visit any internet based site for 20 minutes’ and it will disable that until that time is completed. You can do things with various software that allows you to say, ok, for the next 20 minutes, I’m only going to be doing, let’s say, forum posting as an idea, if you are doing online marketing.
Or you might be reviewing job applications so you can say, I only want, for the next 20 minutes to be able to access these three website domains. You put it in the software, hit ‘start’ and it will restrict everything else. There are those positive constraints to keep you on target, to keep you running in your lanes. It is basically the blinkers they put on horses for horse racing to keep them focused so they don’t get distracted. You’ve got to have those personal blinkers, is a good mental picture to make.
Dom: Yeah, there are some good examples there. Let’s just go back to the time ones because I would like to investigate the more esoteric positive constraints if you’ve got any of those in a little bit. But let’s look at the time stuff. There are lots of different ways you can add positive constraints to your time as far as I can do, as well as to the task. So let’s break that one out.
The time constraints, the most famous one, the ones we talk about, like you said the Pomodoro Technique. This idea that you focus on working to 25 minutes and you work on one job, one task, to achieve one goal in for that period of 25 minutes. And that is good for two reasons. One, if you are short of time, or it is hard to allocate time, allocating 25 minutes or even two 25 minute slots in a day can be done, anybody can do it, no matter how busy you are, by the say ‘busy’ is a bad word.
No matter how full your day is, you should be able to find at least one 25 minute slot. So if you put that positive constraint in, like I’ve put a positive constraint in and said I won’t work in this period of time, you can put that constraint into your day that I won’t do something else, I will work for 25 minutes at, let’s say, 7 a.m. if you are a morning person, or 11:30 p.m. if you are a night person, depending on who you are. So you can get something done by putting that kind of constraint. Again, it is a kind of constraint for the rest of the world. It is a bit like when I record my podcast, I put a positive constraint on that. I close the door to the office and that’s a less than subtle indication to the cats that they can no longer come and walk over my keyboard. And also it is a clear indication to anyone else in the house or the office or wherever that there is something going in there.
Basically I don’t need to walk around the entire building telling everybody that I’m recording, if that door is closed everybody knows there is a reason for it and that reason is I need the sound to be done. I’m constraining other people from interrupting me. But task constraint is a really big thing, I got very interested in the concept of flow, which I’m sure we’ll do a podcast on at some point.
Pete: One of my virtual assistants?
Dom: Not Flo, not Fleur, flow the concept of it as in being in the flow or as you called it, staying in your lane. One of the most important things I discovered through reading a few books, one the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi I believe, it is a very long polish name, very long polish name.
Pete: Can you pronounce that surname again because I…
Dom: No, I’m only doing it once, anyone who wants to hear it again you can re-wind. And, there’s a number of other books on the topic similar to this book but it is all about what disruption does to your concentration. If you are disrupted and you actually lose your concentration and this, a big point of this is in the book we talked for Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, there’s a big section on this, about holding focus. It can take anything up to 20 minutes to re-gain focus once you are fully disrupted.
Pete: Absolutely.
Dom: This is like scientifically proven; they have done all kinds of studies. That’s absolutely dreadful. If you are working for an hour, if you’ve given yourself an hour and you allow any kind of disruption in there, it only takes two disruptions and you’ve basically got no time left to do anything. So one of the big things for me about positive constraints from both a time blocking point of view and a blocking out disruptions point of view is exactly that.
I can very easily and quickly get into a flow state, get into the zone is another way of calling it, where I’m doing something probably repetitive or something that is focused within one application, like my favorite application ScreenFlow or maybe it is sorting through your inbox in Omni Focus or any other capture tool you are using for your tasks. And by just getting on with it, you get into a rhythm, you get into that flow, that zone.
But if somebody disrupts you and everything goes, you can’t remember what you were doing, you can’t remember the last thing you’d done, it can be a technical thing like you can’t remember what you last typed and how many ‘undos’ you need to do. But it could just be a concentration thing; that is one of the big things I’m working on for a positive constraints point of view, focusing that task mind and holding that focus for a period of time just to help me keep that flow, being in the zone.
Pete: Perfect, that is definitely great summary and definition of a positive constraint, that I think is the key, the most successful people that I come across they have that habit and that habit when you really look into it is the habit of consistently putting in positive constraints around their time, around their actions to get the results needed. I think to give you more of an esoteric example as you mentioned Dom, is a good positive constraint can be announcing to the world what you are going to do, because you have constrained yourself by that outward promise.
So, you state your goals on various levels or even having a goal partner, it is a big of a wanky sort of term but I know this has been used to great success in various places and I definitely use it myself and it is something that is getting me through the Ironman. And that goal partner fundamentally is someone who you trust; who is going to keep you accountable to your own actions and having that jewel conversation like, let me give you the Ironman example.
Obviously I’ve got an Ironman coach who is helping me with the training for the triathlon and all that sort of stuff, he is actually a good personal friend of mine as well. So I want to look good to him, because he is a friend of mine. I don’t want to look slack. I don’t want to miss any sessions. I don’t want to come across as whatever term I want to use. I want to be seen as someone who actually gets through it and works hard at training sessions. So that is a positive constraint having him be my coach.
Another good positive constraint could be a mastermind group. If you’ve got a group of people that you are going to be accountable to every week by showing up on time and saying this is what I promised I would be doing by today, this is what I’ve done, here’s my results. You’re being accountable for those actions to someone else. Being accountable to yourself is so easy to get out of, so easy to sort of continually change your own deadlines if you are only accountable to yourself.
But by having someone around you whether it is daily email, I’ve had coaching clients where I suggested to them that they partner up with somebody and they do the similar sort of emails that I require my outsource team to send me just to each other from a goal achievement perspective. A positive constraints is that at the end of every day they have to email each other what their plan for the day was, what they achieved, what they didn’t achieve and why and what they will be doing tomorrow.
And just that little act of that positive constraint to make sure they are going to do that task every day, clearly define what their objectives are for the following day but more importantly send that and make that public to somebody else just starts to put that positive constraint into place and ensure you actually follow through with your promises. It is that commitment and consistency, fact that Robert Cialdini speaks about in his great book Influence applied in a very controlled way.
Dom: I notice you sneaked Influence in there as your little favorite book. I don’t mention mine yet; I’ll squeeze it in somewhere. They are great examples. I like the mastermind as a composite of both an accountability constraint and a time constraint because I know you really, really, really do live this with your mastermind. We’ve talked about this before where you all turn up, that’s your first point, you all turn up at the same place, same time, same day as an absolute set in stone that everybody turns up and takes it seriously.
Then you have that time constraint, where everyone has a window of time to talk about their issues, what they want from the group, how people can help them. And then, on top of those constraints there’s the accountability where they’ve told everybody and everybody in that group is a successful business person so there is that accountability to this group of people, your peers, where you are not accountable to yourself anymore. You can’t slight it. If you haven’t done it by next week, there’s a bunch of really successful guys going to stare at you with at least one eyebrow raised.
Pete: I think a good way to define that is, you’re accountable to your ego. If your ego is on the line, you are going to do a lot more to protect your ego than you are to protect the person looking back at you in the mirror. What you want to do when you are setting goals is make it accountable to your ego, not to yourself. There is a very big difference.
Dom: That is a bit deep.
Pete: It is a bit deep but I think every now and again we can go deep on the PreneurCast here and really get very; needless to say we’ll get very deep.
Dom: I’ll just move along. The accountability thing, I think is a big thing. I wouldn’t have come up with that as a constraint, as a positive constraint. But it is in a way because it is one of those things where a lot of people work better to deadlines or to some form of accountability. Otherwise, all tasks expand to fill the available time. Homework takes the entire three week allotted period of time, back to school days right, the way assignments take up until the client actually wanted delivery. And that’s almost human nature. And it takes a lot to break out of that. And one of the things I think self employed people have, is managing that.
People who have nine to five jobs turn up in offices, have bosses and have somebody that they are just naturally accountable to. They probably still struggle with it. They probably still work up till the wire but they still have that person setting that deadline. I think to me, the most valuable thing I get from positive constraints is a really simplistic implementation of it but it is that, the creation of accountability. That’s some description, yeah? Whether it is announcing to the world or to a particular person that I’m going to do this and asking people to keep an eye on me or if it is putting this thing in stone that I’m not working after 1:00 or between one and four. Or no internet access after 11 at night or whatever that thing is, just to make my lifestyle better.
Pete: Absolutely, it can be as simple as using a distraction free writing application. The thing that has blown my mind, in my little community there has been a lot of conversation over the recent months about distraction free writing. And the wave has kind of passed but it is a perfect conversation to have around positive constraints going to the nth degree in that there’s been an absolute influx of software applications defined as distraction free writing.
What that is, if you think about Microsoft Word as a writing tool, you’ve obviously got the toolbar and the bold icons and then you’ve got insert images and it sits there in your software, in your window with your Skype messages popping up and your Twitter feed pinging away and all that sort of stuff. So you have all these distraction coming around your writing environment in Microsoft Word. And applications like WriteRoom on the Mac and I think Word has a distraction-free writing sort of setting so what you do is turn that on and it makes just the text you are writing appear on the screen with everything else taken away.
So your Skype won’t pop up over the top. You don’t have any sort of bold, underline options and buttons and tabs available to you. It is just the text on the screen with no distractions and it is a great positive constraint when you have something to write. To do that, to keep you on target because it is so easy in this current world of social media to get distracted by so much other random irrelevant stuff. It doesn’t help you achieve the task at hand. So, these sort of things are fantastic. But it is a tool that will help you do that.
But it is also self discipline that you have to have, because without self discipline, you can internalize those positive constraints anyway and flick that mental switch on and you should be able to get your work done just with Microsoft Word. A simple positive constraint is turn Skype off for a little bit as one example, if you miss one conversation on Twitter, it is going to be ok guys. It’s going to be ok if you don’t get re-tweeted or you don’t re-tweet that funny joke that someone said.
Dom: Definitely, and the distraction free tool was something that popped into my mind when we started talking about positive constraints. And you are absolutely right, there are always tools to help you do anything. It doesn’t matter what it is out there in the world now. There are so many people able to write programs and make things and they all are tools to help you or enhance your ability to do it. But at the bottom of it, it comes down to it’s still you. You’ve got to choose to use that tool.
There are people out there who can, for example, manage to just, the example of distraction free writing. There are two real problems with writing. One of them is if you’ve got your Twitter, your Skype, your email binging, all of these things coming on, that is a distraction that stops you from the actual task of creating something, some content. But the real thing with the distraction free writing tools is beyond that. It is that you can’t even add bold or italic or you can’t make something a heading.
You literally can concentrate only on the words, the terminology that is going on that page, which is a really, very, very tight positive constraint. It makes you think about the words rather than messing around with the font and things like that. So, that’s a really good detailed example. But at the end of the day, it is still down to you. You could write just as well in Microsoft Word and, ironically, you could do it with your email binging and your Skype, but you would have to be some type of Zen master of concentration.
Pete: Positive constraints are really, really good when you are actually at that, I call it, that conscious incompetence stage of any sort of task. If you are consciously aware that you are incompetent of doing it well, such as sitting down and writing a 300 word blog post or an email you are going to send out to your database or whatever it might be. You want to put as many positive constraints in place as you can so you can focus on the task at hand. As you move from that conscious incompetent right through the four stages to unconscious competence then you can remove those positive constraints because you’ve internalized them.
Dom: That is a really, really good way to put it, I like that. Where is that conscious incompetence to unconscious competence from?
Pete: I have not idea; I’m going to say it from 1972. I don’t know who was the person who coined it and came up with it but basically, for those that aren’t aware of it, there are four stages you go through in your learning, I think it might be NLP terminology, I know that is where I first became aware of it and first got exposure to it. When you learn to do a skill, you are consciously incompetent; you know you don’t know how to do it. I know I don’t know how to fly a plane.
And then you become consciously competent, I’m trying to think is this the right way? Then you go to conscious competence because you know you are doing it, you are thinking it through. And then you become which way it is, I always get the order mixed up and then you become unconsciously competent. When you drive home, how many times have you driven home without knowing how you got home? You think how did I just get home, I don’t remember seeing those last three traffic lights. You just unconsciously arrived.
Riding a bike, for most people you are just unconsciously competent, you just know how to ride a bike without even thinking about it, pedal, brake and balance and looking for the cars and stuff like that. But when you first started, you knew you didn’t know what to do. But I guess, there is even a stage before that which is unconsciously incompetent; that is the very first stage that you don’t know that you don’t know something. I don’t know, I don’t even know what I don’t know but there are plenty of things out there that I’m sure I don’t know even exist let alone how to do it.
So you start out with unconscious incompetence, then you become consciously incompetent, you know you don’t know it. Then you become consciously competent, because you have to think about it, you have to physically say when I’m going to drive this car, I’m going to put my foot on the brake, I’m going to put my foot on the clutch, I’ve got to undo from first, I’ve got to double clutch to get into second, it is very consciously the process.
Then after driving for a few months or a few years, you become unconsciously competent and you just change gears and talk to the passenger in the back seats, you can change lanes and indicate all at the same time without thinking. That is the process you go through and the positive constraints actually come with you through that all, they will actually disappear as you become more competent at something.
Dom: That is a really good example actually, I remember when my very, very, very driving lesson which was ridiculous amount of time ago and I got in the car with the driving instructor and the first thing he did when I got in the car was turn the radio off. Now obviously we all drive with the radio on and possibly making hands free telephone calls. But when you are first starting, when you are in that conscious incompetent stage. I like this, this is a great summary of what we are talking about, it really brings it home. When you are in this conscious incompetent stage, you need all the help you can get.
So, if you’re trying to write a blog post, why not write it in a text editor rather than trying to work out how to get WordPress to make it look the way you want it to look? For example: I think, we can we like bounce, lets just bounce some of these around, let’s just think of different positive constraints that can help people in different scenarios and let’s just bounce them out for a few minutes as a way to kind of round this episode out?
Pete: Absolutely, I think the first thing is, turning your internet off, get some software or some sort of application to constrain you from doing that, from actually allowing access to your internet services so that way, if you have some stuff, if you really break it down for most people in their business whether you are an online marketer or you own a retail clothing store, there is a lot of stuff you can do in your business that doesn’t need the internet. Most of it, really, can be done without the internet.
So doing stuff like having some sort of tool to actually constrain you is very, very positive in that regard, of internet usage. Ideally, you don’t want to look at your email until you knock off your first three action points of your day. How to actually constrain that? I actually, awhile ago, had some projects to do; I removed the auto email check off of my mail client. I was using Mac Mail which is similar to Outlook, I disabled the auto collection of email so it didn’t check your email every 15 minutes or ping you when an email comes in every two minutes.
And I also removed the send and receive button from the menu bar. So I couldn’t quickly just go and hit send and receive, so those were two positive constraints I did, this is a while ago and I had some projects I needed to get done, for whatever reason I was going through a phase that I wanted to see an email every two minutes. Everyone has a failing, that was my failing for a period of time don’t know why it was but it became my addiction for some weird reason so actually positive constraining myself by removing those two features.
So for me to check my email, I had to grab the mouse, move it to the top of the window, hit tools and then click send and receive. So there was a couple of motions and hopefully I caught myself going through that process and stopped myself and said, no, it’s not email time. And so I broke that habit. Creating your breaking habits it is important to have positive constraints in place to train you as well.
Dom: That’s quite scarily advanced, much more simplistic. Ok, I’ll be less polite… you’re a nerd. Looking at the machine at the moment, being really simplistic up at the menu bar at the top or maybe in the toolbar at the bottom if you are on Windows, I’m on a wifi network, all I need to do is go to the top of the screen, click the little icon with the wifi on it and click ‘switch off the wifi’. That’s it, I’m offline. It can be that simple and that is kind of what I’m hanging on with this one. It can be that simple.
You said a good point; there are a lot of things you can do in business that don’t require the internet. They don’t even require a computer. One of the great positive constraints that I have is I have a pad of paper, a little A5 pad and a pencil. I also carry some note cards if I have that big of bag to carry with me, a little 3×5 note cards and I do a lot of my thinking onto pieces of paper or note cards, or my life scribe pad and pen, but to make sure it is something I will want to digitize later I will skip that step and use the life scribe pen.
And I will also physically relocate myself which is a great thing to do. The positive constrains, how to get away from using a computer and checking into that, go on, sit on a park bench; that will do it. And put your iPad, iPhone, whatever that is in flight mode, so you can’t get all those various signal. Here’s one from that book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning where they say if you make really hard to stop doing what you are doing, you’re more likely to stick at it. Those are very extreme examples. They basically say, go put move the furniture around in your office so that it is hard to get away from your desk.
It takes you an actual, if you are one of those people who wonders away from your desk to avoid doing some work, then put something, move a rolling set of drawers or something so that you have to move them again to get away from your desk. And just like you said, by making checking an email an extra step, a manual step, it makes you stop and think that you’re distracting yourself and maybe you should carry on and get on with it.
Pete: That is exactly the sort of constraints you want to put yourself into so you get the outcomes you are after. There are so many levels of constraint. You want to get fit? Then get your partner to drop you five kilometers from home every Saturday morning after breakfast.
Dom: I’m just really hoping that my partner doesn’t listen to this episode because I have a funny feeling that might accidently happen.
Pete: That is the sort of constraint, like you know, go to sleep the night before in your exercise gear, eliminate the friction a little bit, it is a slight different take on positive constraints but it is basically a whole other podcast about removing the friction which is a simple sort of concept where you want to remove any of the friction between where you are and where you want to be so going to sleep the night before with your fitness gear on, or at least have your fitness gear laid out the night before because it is about…
ah, I don’t know where my running shoes are, I won’t run tomorrow. Actually make sure you get all that stuff out beforehand so the friction is actually removed. It is a different type of positive constraint you can put in place for yourself.
Dom: Yeah, I’ll stick with just laying the clothes out, again, I’m not sure my partner will be too impressed by me…yeah, going to sleep in a track suit, with my trainers on.
Pete: Well, ok, we’re not talking about trainers on; we’re talking about a pair of running shorts. There’s a line, there is a line.
Dom: Before you tell us you have already crossed it, let’s just move on.
Pete: Well look, I think that is probably a good summary of what positive constraints are for everybody out there. Support [at] preneurgroup [dot] com, send us some examples of some positive constraints you have implemented in your life, we may mention them in future episodes of the show, share some laughs.
Dom: Absolutely, and if you have implemented anything that we have mentioned and it has done any positive, you have gotten any positive results from it, let us know. Drop us a line on support [at] preneurgroup [dot] com or give us a comment in the iTunes store, let us know what you think about the topics we are covering and if there’s something that you want us to cover. We do keep track of whatever asks us about and we do try to talk about those topics as we go through. We have our own things that we want to talk about, that we think are important. But you, the audience, are important to us and we want to know what you think. So drop us a note on iTunes comments, on the iTunes store. It only takes a minute as long as you have your iTunes account which hopefully, well most of you listening through iTunes I think. Then drop us a note.
Pete: Absolutely, and don’t forget PreneurMedia.tv is the new home of the PreneurCast podcast so on there we’ve got the transcripts, the show notes, the back catalog are all available over at PreneurMedia.tv so check that out. Subscribe to the RSS feed and keep in touch over there too because you can get everything you need from PreneurMedia.tv.
Dom: Nicely done sir, and on that, I think we will wrap it up with a little bow as you say.
Pete: See you guys next week.
[/peekaboo_content]
Books Mentioned:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Influence – Robert Cialdini
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning – Andy Hunt
Other Links:
http://www.7LeversCalculator.com – Don’t forget the awesome online tool to help you see the effect of improving your figures for each of the 7 Levers of Business. Created by PreneurCast listener Lee Turner (@leeturner).
Win Stuff!
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