You Know What to Do, So Why Aren't You Doing It? John Preston on Decision Paralysis

Your brain is not broken, it’s overloaded. John Preston joins us to explain why so many entrepreneurs, GMs, and sales pros get stuck in a loop of planning, worrying, and second-guessing, even when they already know what to do next. He introduces “Clearing the Sleary,” his upcoming business narrative that turns modern overwhelm into a clear, usable framework. Sleary is an acronym for self-doubt, limiting beliefs, exhaustion, anxiety, regret, and ego, and the metaphor is unforgettable: a clogged sink cannot flow until you stop adding more gunk.

We get practical about recognizing information overload while it’s happening, especially the kind that comes from doomscrolling, nonstop notifications, and trying to keep up with everything at once. John shares a simple litmus test based on what you can actually control, and why clarity systems beat willpower when you’re facing high-stakes business decisions. We also dig into why marketing feels paralyzing today, how avoiding a decision is still a decision, and why most owners underestimate the real dollar cost of spending their time on low-value tasks.

Then we move into the habits that keep momentum going: daily planning as a “vitamin,” not a short-term “medicine,” the razor’s edge between confidence and paralysis, and how to “slay the egg before it becomes a dragon” by catching the inner voice before it spirals. We also talk about using AI tools like ChatGPT as a thought clarifier, plus three important caveats so it doesn’t push you into safer, slower choices by default.

If this conversation helps, subscribe, share it with a business owner who feels stuck, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Pete Shau 1:25

Hello everyone, welcome to the RTO show. I'm your host, Pete Shao. Today, got a great interviewee, kind of somebody who's been here on before. You might know him. I got John Preston on, who has done something else with the 40 flushes, but we have a whole new book coming out. Not out yet, but it's coming out. We want to talk to you about it because the last one made a lot of sense. This one might make more sense to you too. But first, before we do anything else, make sure that you log on to the website, rtoshowpodcast.com. Make sure you scroll down. You want to hit up the newsletter. We talk about things on there that we don't talk about on the podcast. Plus, buy some swag, you can look as good as this in your own home. John, what's going on? How are you doing? How's everything been?

SPEAKER_01 2:04

I'm doing great, Pete. As I mentioned, I just got back from the Caribbean, so I'm kind of in uh recover from vacation mode. And one of the favorite things I like to do is to come on shows like yours and just try to provide something that'll help that business owner out there move forward with their career. Small business is what the world's about, and we just need to make sure we provide them with what they need to be successful.

Pete Shau 2:26

Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you anymore. If you guys remember, John was on last time. He talked about a little bit of a different book. Now he's come up with something new. He's got some acronyms that we're going to talk about, some ideas that we're going

Welcome Back And Meet John

Pete Shau 2:39

to talk about, and this one's a little bit more direct. So, John, in the thought of you come out with the 40 flushes, right? And that was information that you can do and on your little buy time, kind of understanding a little bit more about business. But really, as we were talking, you had some pretty good gems, like talking to people around in your area and literally asking them, what do you think about these people and what's going on and the follow-ups and the sales and what's really going on in the neighborhood of marketing versus what people are going to get if they come to see you? And there was just a there was a bunch of good ideas that came out of that. Now you've got something new. Where did this come from? Where did you come up with this new book idea? First of all, let's start off. What's the name of the book?

SPEAKER_01 3:19

The book is going to be called Clearing the Sleary. And Sleery is a new concept that I've developed to really kind of address something that I was seeing over and over and over again with small business owners. You know, for a lot of times, small business owners, they don't know what to do, so they often don't do anything. But there's another end of that equation that comes into play equally as often. They know what they need to do, but they're just paralyzed. And I kept seeing that over and over and over and over again with sales professionals, with entrepreneurs, with small business owners, is sometimes it's about information. And so 40 flushes was a way of providing small business owners who don't have a lot of time with just a good business education, understanding some simple lessons that they could implement in their business to move forward and grow their profit. But then I realized this second aspect is equally important this concept of what causes us to freeze. Because I know so many times when we're faced with big

Why Smart Owners Still Freeze

SPEAKER_01 4:33

decisions, we we freeze. And we do this in all aspects of our life, whether it's, you know, whether it's losing weight, you know, we we know what we need to do to be successful. There's no information shortage, but we simply can't make ourselves do it. And if you're in sales, you know you need to pick up the phone and call more prospects and line up more presentations. You know if you do that, you'll do more appointments, you'll make more sales, and you'll move forward. And you know you want to get to making more money and making more sales. So what stops you from picking up the phone? I just really started asking that question because I saw it in all walks of life. And what I what I realized was is our brains are not equipped to handle the amount of information that we are now being asked to process. If you think about your brain and think about the human brain for most of human existence, for most of human existence, all of our decisions were very simple. You were based on fear of a threat of some kind or fear of a shortage of some kind. So, like for 99% of human history, that's really all we worried about, those two things. And that was how we made our decisions. In today's world, we have so much information bombarding us at all times that we simply live in this state of overwhelm. And when we get overwhelmed, we resort back to those two core fears. Am I going to put myself in danger? Or am I going to put my business in danger if I make a bad decision? Or am I going to run out of something, have a shortage, whether that be manpower, whether that be money or whatever? So we fall back into those default positions. And in today's world, that just doesn't work because not making a decision and taking action is making a decision. It's making a decision to stay where you are and not move forward. And so Sleary's really all about that. You know, when it people become entrepreneurs, when they open up their first business and they're working for themselves, they they're not warned about just how loud that inner voice is. We all have this inner voice inside our head that is an absolute jerk. It's constantly telling us we suck. It's constantly telling us, I don't know, I can't make these kind of important decisions. I'm not good at this. I'm not worthy of having my own business. I'm not the kind of person who can make big money. And that voice is constantly hounding us. And no one warns us about that. Nobody prepares us for that. There's nothing in school that teaches you how to deal with that internal voice. And so what happens is we just get overwhelmed by it and we stop moving forward. And I see this with small business owners over and over and over again. They basically, when you start your business, you dream of building it into something big and providing a life for your family beyond what you currently have. And you have these great big visions of what you're going to do. But then you start the business. And maybe you have a little bit of success. Maybe you have enough business to kind of stabilize where you are and pay your bills. And then those decisions start to fire up. And now you're like, you know, when you're first starting out, you don't have a lot to lose. But once you're at that point where you're able to pay your bills, suddenly that feels like a threat when you make decisions that are going to cost you more money, or when you make decisions about expansion, or and you start to tighten up. And eventually you get very comfortable staying where you are. And in today's world, you're either growing or you're moving backwards because the world keeps moving and keeps growing. And so this freezing is something that affects, but we we no one talks about it, and we don't really have a framework for it. So I created Sleary as a way of understanding the struggle that all of us battle. And a great way of thinking of it, and this is what I do in the book, is the book's kind of what they call a business narrative. And we've all read it, you know, uh we've seen these books that just kind of tell the story of somebody experiencing a struggle in life, you know, the one-minute manager type of thing.

Pete Shau 9:32

I love the one-minute manager.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

You get to you get to see these ideas and these concepts through the mind of a character. And so clearing the slurry involves this salesperson who's struggling, who's really struggling. And she she knows what to do. She knows she needs to make more calls, she knows she needs to practice her presentation, she knows she needs to master the objections, but she simply can't make herself do it because she's overwhelmed. And she encounters this mentor figure, which is common in these types of books, who takes her back into the back of this kitchen at a crowded restaurant and shows her this sink. And this sink is clogged up to the point where water's about to run up, run over into the floor. And he points out that that's what's happening in her own mind. And that's the Sleary that we all have. We have this accumulation of junk. Sleary is an acronym that stands for self-doubt, limiting beliefs, exhaustion, anxiety, regret, and your own ego. And all of these things just clutter up our mind and stop us from being able to do anything, just like all that gunk clogs up that sink and doesn't let the water flow. Now, if you've got a crowded sink like that, is the best thing to do add more water? Of course not. If you've got that crowded sink, is the best thing to do pour grease into it? Of course not. But in today's world, so many of the motivational aspects that have worked in the past, so many of the management styles that have worked in the past no longer work. They now muddy the water and increase the clock. We live in a world where having a boss tell you you need to do this or else doesn't make you do it anymore. Because all that does is it pours more grease into

The Sleary Acronym Explained

SPEAKER_01 11:50

that sink and makes it harder for you to take action and move forward. We live in a world, especially with decisions and careers that require creative thought, being offered bonuses doesn't work anymore. Because when you're offered a bonus, you start focusing on different things, and then you start feeling guilt because you didn't earn the bonus, which makes you feel like more of a loser, which makes you less likely to take action. So when you think about how our world is different than it was when you and I were kids, and certainly when if you go back through time, our world is changing so fast right now. With AI and everything else and social media and all this constant information stream, our world will change more during the course of this conversation than it would have changed in a decade a couple hundred years ago. And our brains just aren't equipped to handle that kind of information. So the first thing I want to address with people is recognize that that struggle is universal. It is not something that just you are going through. Everybody goes through it and they think they're on an island and they're the only one dealing with it. We look around us and we see other business owners that look like they got their stuff together. Meanwhile, they're looking back at us thinking we've got our stuff together. And recognizing that we're all in this together and learning how to navigate this slerey. Now, the way you clear that clog is to first of all stop pouring more crap in the sink.

Pete Shau 13:47

How do you get information when we're on it we're in a society of information overload, when your phone is going off, your emails are going off, you're on a tablet, you're on a computer every day, you know, you're typing your emails, you're getting notifications, your TV's telling you different things. When you have a world of information like that, how do you take a step back when you almost need to be in three different conversations at once?

SPEAKER_01 14:10

Well, the first thing is to recognize what it what impact it's having. Because it's very easy to think that that that's not having a greater impact. That, you know, me, me, me doom scrolling for 30 minutes is not going to affect my business. But it does. Because it reinforces some of those fears and all that are creating those self-doubts and limitations that are clogging your sink in the first place. So the first thing is to recognize the impact that all of that is having on you. Now, that doesn't mean disconnect, because some of that can actually help clear the mechanism, but it's to recognize what is having a positive impact

Doomscrolling And Mental Bandwidth

SPEAKER_01 15:43

and what is not. And so one of the best litmus tests we can do is just regularly ask ourselves that question. I tell people all the time, think about what you're thinking about. Because most of us don't. Most of us just react mentally to the environment or the stimulus, and we don't think about it. And so the first step, you know, when you're when you're scrolling through social media and you're getting all these posts about how the world's falling apart, take a moment and just think about what that's making you think about. And if it's it's creating more of an issue, then it needs to be cut off. If it's actually reinforcing, a great test of all of our interactions and everything that we do is to ask ourselves, is this action moving us towards the goals we want in life, or is it providing another barrier from us reaching the goals that we haven't? And just simply evaluating your actions and your thoughts on that premise. Is it taking me to where I want to go, or is it creating a barrier that stops me from getting there?

Pete Shau 16:57

Let me let me ask you a question, John. I'm let's say, okay, let's say I got a business, and I do. But let's say I got a business. I'm I'm an RTO member. Let's say I'm a GM. I'm sitting there at night, I'm trying not to overload, right? We're not even going to say owners at this point. I mean, it could be an owner, it could be an owner operator, but I'm sitting there at night, I'm trying to unwind, and I'm scrolling. Like you said, I'm doom scrolling. I'm looking through here, I'm flipping. And whether it's TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, you know, LinkedIn, it could be anything. What is a trigger for me to say, this is exactly what John's talking about? There is a lot of information here that I think is going to affect my day, but I I or maybe I don't think it's going to affect my day. And I'm just literally scrolling, but the information is still kind of pushing its way in. And what it's doing is clogging the pipes. How do I recognize this information overload as it's happening so that I could look at it and go, like you just said, let me think about what I'm thinking about. Well, what why is why is this affected me the way that is there triggers? Is there something that you've come up with to say you're in that mode right now? You probably should stop.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

Well, the the first thing is to ask yourself, is there anything related to this information that I'm currently getting that I can control or do anything about? I mean, there are three things that we can control in our life. We can control our actions, what we do. We can control our mindset, how we view the world, and we can control the way we react to the actions of others. And what you will find when you start analyzing that feed you were talking about is you will find yourself expending large quantities of your bandwidth worrying and thinking about things that you cannot impact in any way, shape, or form that don't fall into one of those three categories. So that's a great litmus test when you're in that situation. Is does this represent anything that I can take action on that should influence my mindset in a positive way or how I'm reacting to the actions of others? And and and just that simple thing, you'll really, it's one of those concepts. Once you see this, you can't unsee it. When you go home tonight and you're scrolling through through TikTok or your Facebook live stream or whatever, you're going to just because of this awareness, start to see those things differently and recognize which ones are actually adding to that clog drain and which ones might actually be something that can help me clear that clog. Now, in terms of breaking the clog up, what is essential is clarity of thought. And this is something that most people don't ever have. I mean, how often are your thoughts clear? And in reality, in order to have clarity of thought, you have to have systems for thinking and systems

The Three Things You Control

SPEAKER_01 20:10

for making decisions. And what what I realized was 40 flushes was a clarity system because for some business owners out there, one of their major concerns that clears their that that clogs their sink is the fact that they don't know a lot about business and they know they don't know, but yet they're intimidated by the thought of learning. Because when they think about learning new things, they think of a major commitment that's going to require intense study with big textbooks, just like they remember back from high school and college. And many people weren't that great as students under that environment in the first place. And so they're really part of their clog is this fear of learning. And 40 flushes was a system or is a system for overcoming that part of your slury, that part of your clog. And so one of the things I'm really focusing on now is after you identify your clog and recognize this is a universal problem that stops me from moving forward, what system can I initiate that will allow me to make good business decisions while keeping the fear and the self-doubt and the self-incrimination out of my decision process? And so that that seems incredibly simple. So, but I'm developing now systems for developing a marketing strategy. You know, we talked a little bit on the last call about understanding

Clarity Systems For Hard Decisions

SPEAKER_01 21:55

how to grow a business from a profit perspective and recognizing that more customers doesn't necessarily mean a better business and how to look at your business and figure out what metrics I can move to move that. Well, the next stage from that is to actually develop a system for making those decisions. Because if you've analyzed your business and you know that this particular metric is what I can move the easiest, that will increase my profit the fastest, and your marketing strategy is to move that metric, that gives you a system for making marketing decisions. And so you're not suddenly overwhelmed. You know, marketing is a perfect example of what I was talking about. If you were to go back a hundred years, let's rewind to 1926. If I'm a small business owner in a small to mid-sized community, and I was trying to decide how to market my business, my decision was very easy. Do I advertise in the local newspaper or not? It was literally a binary choice. Fast forward to today's world, and if I'm running a small business and I'm thinking about marketing, I literally have tens of thousands of options I can choose for advertising. That's the level of overwhelm. That's where that overwhelm I talked about and how our world today is so different from the worlds of the past. That business owner in 1926 basically said, Am I going to be in the newspaper or not? He looked at businesses that were in the newspaper, they were successful. But what he didn't know is were they able to advertise because they were successful? Or was the fact they were advertising the reason they were successful? So he could debate that to himself. But at the end of the day, the only thing that mattered was yes or no. In today's world, Because there's 10,000. And if I don't understand how this one works differently than this one, and I don't know how to compare option A with option C that's on a different end of the spectrum technologically, I'm just overwhelmed. So what do I do as a business owner because I'm overwhelmed? I simply choose not to decide. And so I don't do anything and my business fails.

Pete Shau 24:30

Let me ask you something. Are you getting everything out of your rent-to-owned business? If you're not an APRO member, then the answer is probably no. Look, advocacy is April's bread and butter. This is why they were created and what they do best. But here's the thing April membership is about way more than advocacy. April connects you to the movers and the shakers of the industry, people who've been there, done that, and they can help you do it even better. APRO's monthly webinars give you expert insights and actionable takeaways. Got questions about complex regulations or sticky situations? No problem. April's legal hotline gives you direct access to experts who have got the answers. That's a peace of mind that you can't put a price on. And let's not forget the resources, news, updates, and tools to keep you ahead of the curb. Scholarships for your team? Check. Disaster relief when you need it most? Double check. April is your ultimate support system in the rent-to-own world. Head over to rtoh.org and join the APRO family today. Because in this business, more isn't just better. It's essential. See you at the top with APRO. Well, and there's a lot, there, I mean, there's a lot of interconnectivity, absolutely. And of course, you know, with the other side of that, is if I do choose, I have so many more avenues to go in because if I touch one, especially on the internet, it goes everywhere versus my local area where the newspapers used to be. Now it's it's multi-state, it's multi-you know, country. So it is an overbearing decision to make. As you're looking at this, right? And you made that analogy of you go in and you see this clog sink. There is celery everywhere. You're there. How do you fix it? Well, let me take it back a little bit. How do you, for people who are listening who want to open a business or have just started a business and they're going, you know what? This sounds like something that I might run into. How can they recognize that their sink is getting full? Now, obviously, if we're looking at a sink and we see it getting full, we know. But the analogy put back into the hands of a new owner or a new shop manager or a new manager, they might not see that. And then as we're approaching it now, they might come to it as, I'm already overloaded. I already have too much stacked against me. How does somebody look at

APRO Support And Member Benefits

Pete Shau 26:41

it and go, you know what, that's the Sleery that they're talking about starting to build right now? How can they attack it early before it's too late?

SPEAKER_01 26:48

The first thing, I mean, basically, and I could sum that up in one word strategy. Most business owners do not have a strategy for making important decisions. So when those decisions pop up, they default to emotion as how that decision is made instead of what's in the best interest of their business. You know, and the best way to know that you're starting to suffer from this, well, first of all, I can tell you, they were suffering from this early on, because we suffer from this in our personal lives, we suffer from this in all aspects. But here's what's interesting about the entrepreneur. At one moment in time, they were able to make a decision to move forward when they decided to start their business. That automatically involved powering through the fear, it involved accepting the risk,

Strategy Over Emotion In Business

SPEAKER_01 27:46

it involved all of those things in order for them to say, I'm going to start this business. So, in that moment of time, they were able to make a decision to move forward. And that automatically puts them in a different category than the hundreds of thousands of employees out there that have thought once a week for the last 20 years, one of these days I'm going to start my own business. So, so merely making that decision moves you into a different category. Now, here's when you recognize you have a problem is when you start not making decisions. When you start avoiding decisions, because here's the reality. But the reality is in every aspect of life and every aspect of business, making a bad decision is better than no decision at all. People that make bad decisions learn from them and improve and grow. People who make no decision stay where they are. And that's just that's just the reality of where we are. Not making a decision is making a decision to stay where you are. And and that's that's when businesses fail. Now I'm not saying you do do stupid things, but in almost every situation, when someone is struggling making a decision, they know what they should do. They know what they should do, they just can't do it. Or one of two options that both are good, but they're so terrified of picking the wrong one that they don't make either. That's where business owners find themselves in. And so when you find yourself not making a decision, you know you're wrestling with Sleary and you're clocked. And what happens is we start looking at things from a different perspective. I I met with a a uh lady that owns a very successful catering company not long ago. And and she does all of her marketing on social media. So she takes a tremendous amount of pride in the fact that she doesn't buy advertising and she does it through social media. So one of the exercises that I I sat down and did with her is I said, okay, how many hours a day do you spend on social media? And she was spending about two to three hours a day either creating content or responding to to comments and engaging with the audience. And I said, now, how much time, how much time do you spend a day on the things that you as the business owner can do? Developing new recipes, reaching out and engaging with customers, those kind of things. How much time do you spend on the things that you and only you can do? And she she said somewhere roughly you know 10 hours a week or something like that. And I said, now on a given week, what you know, what's your average revenue as a business? And then I figured into what her revenue is when she's doing the things that she can do to generate revenue. And the bottom line was every hour she spends doing those things, she generates about $900 of revenue for her business. So what I pointed out to her is that three hours she's spending doing her social media is actually costing her business $2,700 a day if she spent that money doing the things that would grow her business. And you know, those are the type of things every business owner has that they don't think about. Because she's spending $900 of her time an hour doing something she could pay someone $20 an hour to do for her. And in her mind, she's viewing that as a win because she's not paying somebody to do her social media. Because most business owners never attach a dollar value to their personal time. And those are the kind of things. Having a system for how for when you hire, when you bring people on, when you outsource, that's one of the things a business owner needs to do. Having a system for what your marketing should accomplish is one of the things a business owner should do. It's all about developing those systems or strategies so that you can make decisions independent of your fears. Because we are designed by nature. If we don't have that system, most of our decisions are based on fear. And we can't have that if we're going to build a successful business.

Pete Shau 33:17

I completely agree. You know, you mentioned in here in your book there were some things uh I wanted to talk about. One of them was the razor's edge. Can you explain that idea?

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Yeah. Um, I come from a physics background, actually. That's what I studied in school. And so I'm generally a science-minded person. And hey uh I used to, if you were to rewind my life 15 years, and you had approached me and started talking about things like affirmations or visualization or or or any positive self-talk, any of that stuff, I would have given it the entire BS call. Because as a scientist, it just didn't make sense to me that you could stand in front of a mirror and say a bunch of frilly things, and the whole world reshapes itself for you to be successful. However, when I went down this path and started working with business owners and entrepreneurs and salespeople, and I really started thinking about what stopped them from being successful, what I realized is that I was leaving out a very important factor in my worldview. And that is the fact that every single one of us lives our life right on the edge of being paralyzed by fear and self-doubt. And anything we can do to push ourselves away from that line a little bit increases our chances of success. Because of this razor's edge line, most people operate on about a five percent effectiveness rate. We really only accomplish about 5% of what we're capable of because for every minute that we spend actually taking action, we spend an hour debating with ourselves what we should do next and worrying about what we should do and stressing over what we've done, and

The Razor’s Edge Of Fear

SPEAKER_01 35:28

and you know, looking at visualizing different pathways and deciding all this. So when you're able to pull back from that razor's edge and start making your decisions away from that fear, then suddenly you become more effective. And so if you're suddenly able to accomplish 15% of your what you're capable of instead of five, you suddenly have this advantage over everybody else around you. So those things like meditation and affirmations, for most people, they back them away from the edge. And what happens is if you fall on the other side of that edge, that's when you become paralyzed and you can't move forward. And what I really started to realize is all of our life, we've looked at people who struggled and said that person's just lazy. Well, most people don't realize this, but cold doesn't exist. Cold doesn't exist. In the science world, cold is the absence of heat. If there's not it, if there's not enough heat there, it's cold. But cold itself doesn't exist. The same thing really applies for laziness. Lazy people or the people that we have traditionally defined as lazy, whether that's other people or ourselves when we're struggling, because a lot of times we'll cuss out ourselves for being lazy. What that usually represents is somebody that is so past that razor's edge that they just don't know what to do first or what to do next. So they don't do anything. Nobody out there wants to not be successful. But if you're on the wrong side of that razor's edge, if your sink is clogged completely, nothing you do makes sense because you convince yourself that there is one right thing to do. And before I can take any action at all, I got to figure out what that is. And that's when you just are paralyzed and you don't take actions. And that actually what's what's amazing about that is if you're on that side of the line, then the fact that you self-abuse yourself for not taking action adds to the drain and makes it that much harder and creates this spiral where your club just gets thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is you have to really not only use systems to clear the drain, but you also have to have systems in place that involve maybe, you know, meditation or something that serves as as drain cleaners to stop it from building back up. Because sometimes you can clear the drain and then somebody immediately dumps a bunch of scraps in there and it's clogged the next day. So you really have to constantly do things to keep that water flowing and keep yourself away from that razor's edge. So there's really, it's really just two different ways of looking at the same concept.

Pete Shau 38:52

Something you said, 5% seems like an extremely low number. It's it's really hard. I'm not, you know, it's when you start thinking about it, 5% just seems like, wow, that's that is a you know, 95% on the table. If you had somebody who was really on it, what is the difference? If you have somebody who's really on it versus somebody who's got, you know, that sleary thought mindset going on, what is the difference? I know, you know, if we said somebody had 100%, that would just be like the most amazing, highest IQ person ever. But what is an average entrepreneur that is successful, that has the ability to make these decisions, where do they sit on that realm versus a 5% person who's really struggling?

SPEAKER_01 39:29

Well, here's the thing. And I I would ask this to your audience, and I would ask this to you as well. How many times have you got to the end of the day, gotten home, kicked back on the couch at night, felt totally exhausted because you worked such a hard day, but you could not identify any one thing you got accomplished that moved your business forward?

Pete Shau 39:55

Well, John, you got to mention half of my day, uh half of my week right there, right there. Like that there's a couple of days a week. It's like I have no idea what caused me to be as drained and as tired as I am.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

That means on those days, you spent your entire day thinking about action, worrying about action, regretting actions you made, and you didn't actually take action. So when I talk about being 5% effective, that's the perfect day that represents it. Because you, you, you, what you were capable of doing to move your day forward didn't happen because you spent so much time worrying about. One of the exercises I love doing with business owners, and this is one all of your entrepreneurs listing can can do on their own time, is I encourage everybody to go to their phone, actually hand their phone to a wife, a kid, whatever, and have them set a dozen random alarms during work hours over the next three days. And and they don't tell you when it is, so you don't know when this alarm is going to go off. And when that alarm goes off, I want you to keep a log and write down what you were doing when that alarm went off. And what you're going to find is that every time that alarm went off, you were not doing anything. You were thinking about doing something or worrying about doing something or regretting something you did or something of that nature. And I've done this with probably 50 different entrepreneurs over the last 10 years, and no one has ever been caught working more than three times.

Pete Shau 41:52

Really? That is huge. That is huge. Is I I you know, you mentioned also in the book slaying the egg before it becomes a dragon. Is that is that kind of is that kind of what this is doing? You're you're seeing a problem before it manifests. You're you're using terms and ways and ideas, you're using these uh strategies to kind of identify, hey, wait a minute. I do have a little bit more time on my day. I haven't been doing as much as I should do. And now that I'm identifying it, it gives me a chance to actually get back into the focus of what I need to be doing.

SPEAKER_01 42:24

Yeah, it's one of those things. Spirals can work two ways. Spirals can, you know, you get momentum going in a business or you get milk momentum going in a sales career, it can feed on itself because you're seeing those kind of rewards and suddenly you're doing more action, you can move forward. Unfortunately, for most people, especially entrepreneurs and salespeople, spirals work more often negatively than positively. You have a bad day, it gets in your head. You have another bad day, it gets more in your head. And the longer that goes on, the harder it is to break out of that. And that's where thinking about what you're thinking about comes into play. You know, and data can be an enormous. And one of the things, let's say I'm working with a salesperson, and and uh they they have trouble picking up the phone and calling prospects. And they immediately will default to I suck on the phone. But then we'll send we'll analyze the data, and maybe for their particular industry, the average is it takes 15 phone calls to get an actual prospect. Well, they made six phone calls and didn't get a prospect, and so they determined that inner voice started shouting, You suck, you suck, you suck. When in reality that wasn't true at all. They just hadn't made enough phone calls yet for the numbers to play out. So learning to think about what you're thinking about, recognizing those moments where your inner thoughts don't marry reality and cutting it off there, that's killing the dragon while it's an egg. Because otherwise, what's going to happen, because you've convinced yourself you suck at this, you're gonna stop doing it, which is gonna reinforce your lack of activity, which is going to reinforce your lack of sales, which is going to start to reflect on how much money you're making. That's the spiral that shuts people down. But if you'd recognized it the moment that inner voice said something in your head that just wasn't real, you could have stopped it all. And that's that's that killing, that crushing that egg before that dragon's bowl.

Pete Shau 44:49

I love the idea. You know, as you you mentioned it earlier about somebody who's having a sales issue, somebody who's having some issues going through it. Is the book shown through the eyes of this character that you're talking about? And it's and that's how you kind of define some of the prospects you have in the book. It's like, hey, she's going through this and she's learning this situation, and then we spell it out to the reader. Hey everyone, it's Pete Chao here from the RTO Show podcast, and I want to tell you about a company that's making a real difference in the rent-to-owned space. WoW Brands. I've seen firsthand how they approach marketing. Let me tell you, it's not just about ads. WoW brands build complete digital ecosystems designed specifically for the rent-to-one industry. Their e-commerce and lead generation strategies are built to bring qualified leaders. Did I mention that they are actively working with the rent-owned industry while also being members of April and Trip? Listen, these folks are passionate problem solvers. They don't just slap something together, they design, build, and scale the kind of digital retail tools your business needs. Your customers actually want. So if you're serious about growing, reach out to WoWBrands at WildBrands.com. I trust them, and I think you will too.

SPEAKER_01 46:01

Yes. She's learning how to deal with her own sleery through this metaphor. And I think in some people, you know, it's interesting. You can sometimes get a message across with a story and a narrative far more than just facts and data. And so my hope is that that people will see themselves in this protagonist and say, hey, I can relate to that. I've been there. Because that's what it is. Whether it's sales, no matter what it is, whether it's, you know, weight loss journey, health journeys, you know, learning, educational struggles, we all we all are fighting these battles and recognize it. And I will you, the other thing that's a nice secondary effect of understanding this concept is recognizing that everyone around you is going through this same struggle. You know, one of the things that's interesting is we all know people that just don't seem to make very good decisions. That that the actions they take don't seem to make any sense to us. Once you understand that those decisions are being driven by their sleery and their and their insecurities, they make a lot more sense. Because every single person, every single day, operates and makes decisions and live their lives by one of two things. Either they're guided and steered by their insecurities, or they have learned how to control those insecurities and make decisions in spite of them. And when you start seeing this in other people, whether it's your spouse, whether it's your friends, whether it's so-and-so you work with, it will help you understand that. Now, in sales, this is huge because when you've got a product that obviously people need and will benefit people, and they even recognize as a customer how much they need this, but they simply can't say yes. Understanding that that is their sleery and understanding what is clogging their drain and stopping them from taking action will allow you to help them navigate that. Because Henry, I I can tell you, and this is a big deal in the world of anything, is with all of this information that's out there, it's very easy for us not to make decisions. It's very easy for us to kick the can down the road. It's very easy for us to think if I wait longer, an obvious no-brainer decision will come up and I can make that one. But but those, that's not the real world. There's gonna, yes, there's gonna be another option tomorrow. Yes, there'll be another decision to make, but how long are you gonna wait for one that's never going to come? Because of this overwhelm, there's never gonna be a decision that is so overwhelmingly a no-brainer that you're gonna make it. And just that you mentioned earlier, how do I know when this is happening? You know when there is clearly a decision you need to make that you're avoiding making.

Pete Shau 49:35

Yeah. You know, you mentioned a couple things uh that kind of wanted me to the book makes a big distinction between medicine and vitamins and and some other stuff that you, you know. I wanted you to get into that because the thought processes that you come up with in the in in the way you described that kind of intrigue me the way it comes out as far as business and and entrepreneurs go. Can you explain that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 50:00

Yeah. What what I see over and over again is I see people struggling. And and for a brief period of time, they will come up with the solution, either with my help or or through outside sources, and they'll figure out how to get back on track. And for a while, they will do very well, and then they'll slide back to where they were before. And one of the things that comes into play is they treat business solutions and emotional solutions and mental health solutions as a medicine. I'm going to take them when I'm sick. I'm struggling doing this. So here's how I'm going to fix myself. The reality is those kind of tools and mechanisms are not medicines, they're vitamins that you take even after your problem is solved because they prevent the problem from coming back. And and so, so that's a key distinction that comes into play. Again, and I'll give you a I'll give you a great example of this in the real world. The single most important thing that a business owner can do to increase and grow their business is to take 10 to 15 minutes at the end of every day to map out what they're going to do the next day. We as human beings suck at making decisions on the fly. If I if I've got a free 30 minutes, let's say I have an appointment scheduled and they don't show, and I've got I've got an hour. Let's say it's an hour, that suddenly I don't have anything planned. My here's what takes place, and see if this sounds familiar. Okay, well, I need to do this, but I can't do that till I do this. Ooh, but this is important, but I can't do that because I haven't done this, but I can't do that because I don't have this done. Well man, but over here, uh and and and you do that for about an hour and you look up and wonder where your time went, and you actually accomplished nothing. And if I was to ask you what you got done during that free hour, you would

Vitamins Not Medicine For Growth

SPEAKER_01 52:12

say, I have no idea. Eventually you'd just say, Okay, screw it, I'll grab a cup of coffee. And so we do that over and over again. Well, simply taking 10 to 15 minutes every night and mapping out your next day. Look at that massive list of things you have to get done and prioritize it off the clock so you don't have a ticking clock in your head while you're trying to decide. It's so much easier. And so then you say, okay, tomorrow, here's one thing that I am absolutely going to get done. Here's a couple other things. I've got this appointment here. If he doesn't show up, here's how I'm going to fill that hour. Simply taking 15 minutes and mapping that out the day before will instantly, instantly make you more productive. And most people don't do it. So I will work with people often who are really having time management issues, really struggling with task priorities and task management and getting stuff done. And so the first thing we will do is establish that regimen of every night, last thing you do before you go to bed or before you leave the office is map out the next day. They'll come back to me a month later and say, Oh my God, this is awesome. I've gotten more done in the last month than I've done in the past six months. And then we'll say awesome. And then three months later, I look up and they've quit doing it again. And they've gone back because they missed a couple days and things still went okay because they had some residual planning out there. And then they just stopped doing it. And they went right back to where they were before. And that's what I mean by medicine versus vitamins. That process of planning it out the night before is a vitamin. It stops you from getting in that time management woes, not just to fix your current problem, but to make sure you're able to maintain that level of productivity from now on. And that's where most people they come up with a solution to fix their current emergency, but as soon as it's fixed, they stop doing what they're doing.

Pete Shau 54:32

Well, it's definitely a mental challenge. I think nowadays people have the attention span. You know, I had a the last guest on was mentioning how our attention spans have like dramatically reduced. You're talking about 100 years ago. Same thing is that the attention spans from between then and now, because of the inundation of information and all the sources that you get it from, and it it's not just one, right? It's you're on your TV, it's on your radio, it's on your streaming, whether it's you're streaming uh on Spotify or streaming in Pandora, whether you're looking at Hulu, there is so much information that's coming into you from so many different directions, and you can get bogged down. You know, coming into the last leg of this, you have five commitments in your later chapter, you know, kind of like name the clog, stop the flow, apply the vitamins, plunge the action, look outward. Those are some solid ideas. Are they referenced through the entire book and the ideas of how to use them and how to apply them through every single everyday situation? I would imagine is somewhere plagued in through the book where somebody can see actual examples of what that is.

SPEAKER_01 55:34

You can see the growth with this particular character of implementing it. Now, now here's the here's the thing you have to understand. And it's kind of laid out in the book for a reason. One of the big mistakes that people make is they try to fix everything at once. And when you try to fix everything at once, you're actually adding more clog to the drain. Because you're just overwhelming yourself even further. And and if if if any aspect of that transformation is disrupted, now you've got guilt and shame thrown in there as well for not being able to implement your plan. So one of the things that's key in overcoming this is to recognize it's not something you're over going to come overnight. You're going to have to take it one step at a time. And one of my favorite books in terms of being more effective is a book called Organize Tomorrow Today by Jason Selk. And in it, he offers all these different time management systems to help people. And he says at the very beginning of don't do all of them. Pick one. Open this book up, read one chapter, implement it before you finish the rest of the book. And I think that is such a big mistake we all make. We want to be where we want to be tomorrow. But when we try to do that, we pour more grease into the code.

Pete Shau 57:01

That's that's well, I mean, that's really true. I mean, nowadays we are a get-it-now society, right? Whether it's Amazon or whatever situation that we're in, we we want it now. We want to stream now, we want to get the answers now, we want AI to do it for us now. We want we want all the problems to be solved within the next few minutes, and it really doesn't help anything.

SPEAKER_01 57:20

Now you mentioned something we haven't talked about here is AI is actually contributing heavily to most people's clog. Whether it's the fear of what AI is going to do to my job, what AI is going to do here, or for most people, they go to AI and they'll ask a simple question and get a very complex answer that once again overwhelms them and adds to their sleering. One of the things I also work with people on is using AI as a clarifier. And if used correctly in that capacity, it can do wonders to help clear your drain. And uh and one of the things I encourage people to do is to think about all of the things that you have going on that are consuming your thoughts, either in your personal life or with your business, and specifically with your business, since that's what we're talking about here. Think about all the things you've got that are just hanging over you as an entrepreneur. Go to your favorite AI. I use ChatGPT, but they all can serve different functions, and literally turn on the microphone and just start talking. Talk about where you want to get to, talk about your goals, talk about your struggles, talk about all of the different decisions you have to make, talk about all the different tasks that you need to do, and say, where should I start? And let AI serve as a clarifying tool to help you sort those thoughts. It's almost like we all have this mass of clutter in our heads that's just, it's like oozing out our ears all these different possibilities and thoughts and ideas. And I want to do this, can't do that, need to do that, suck at this, great at that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And every time we try to move forward, our mind is just so jumbled that

Using AI To Clear The Clutter

SPEAKER_01 59:31

we simply freeze and don't do anything. Using AI to clarify that can be incredibly powerful because it's going to be able to sort through all of that, prioritize it, marry it with your goals, and actually put together a roadmap for you to use for your daily planning to get to where you want to be. Now, there are a couple caveats that I make sure people understand when you do that. AI does two things that are incredibly annoying if you are trying to use it as a thought clarifier. It actually does three things. Number one is it parents you. AI systems are programmed and designed to basically be your smart mom. It will steer you away from risk, it will steer you away from things that that might put you at some kind of misfortune. But a lot of times when you're an entrepreneur, you need to live around the edges. So you need to be aware that it will it will point you back to the safe route. So if you're if you're a business type, you need to be aware of that because you need to recognize that that to have great success, the safe route is not always the best one. If every entrepreneur acted like their mom told them to and didn't take risks, no business would ever grow. So understand AI is going to do that, but be aware of it. The second thing is it's going to push you to industry standards and industry norms. For most people, that's okay because you want to know how successful businesses and other businesses in your industry are doing it. For those that are trying to innovate, you don't want that. You want to shy away from norms. And then the third thing it's going to do is it's often going to offer you advice when you may not be ready for it yet. So use that, use those things and operate from an awareness. But if used correctly, AI can be an incredible offloading of all the mental crap that you've got to help you prioritize. So when you are mapping out your day each day, you've got help prioritize.

Pete Shau 1:01:53

Well, John, I mean, words of wisdom, guys, you know how it is with the sleery going on, make the right decisions. John Preston, as always, a great interview. Let me ask you a question. Where can our listeners get your book when it's out and how would they get it? Is it is it going to be an ebook? Is it going to be a regular book? How do they do that?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:12

It will be an e it will be both. It'll be an ebook and a regular book. I actually have have not launched it yet because some of my theories continue to evolve. So I'm having to go back and and re-edit some chapters and rethink it through and different things. You know, obviously I'd go back to 40 flushes as well. For a business owner, I get so much critical acclaim from for that because it does take business concepts and make them easy to understand. So that would be there. You know, you can can certainly follow me on any of the social media platforms. I'm in the process of kind of streamlining that. One of the things that I've I've made the mistake that I would absolutely tell business owners not to do is I've tried to be everything to everybody because the things I'm talking about really apply to all aspects of life. So I'm really trying to focus that down a little bit right now. So you'll kind of see that evolution on all my social stuff. It's the jpbusinusacademy.com is where you will find that. But but just be on the lookout for it because it it really is, I think understanding that the way our brains worked in past decades just don't work anymore because we're asking them to take on so much more information, sort so much more data, and make so many more complex decisions than we've ever asked it to do in the history of mankind. So understand that what you're struggling with is not your problem. It's a problem everybody deals with. And don't be ashamed of it. You know, just recognize that you need to develop the systems for making those decisions without those natural fears overriding common sense and

Where To Find John And Wrap

SPEAKER_01 1:04:04

data.

Pete Shau 1:04:05

That sounds good. What book title are they looking for so they can see it when it comes out?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:09

Clearing the Sleary is what it will be called.

Pete Shau 1:04:12

I appreciate having you on the show, talking to us a little bit about it. As usual, some great advice for the entrepreneurs that we have on here, our business guys, some of our GMs that are looking to step up. Guys, if you guys have any questions about what's going on with John, you're always welcome to hit up the show, Pete at the RTO ShowPodcast.com. Remember to go on to the website, the RTOShowPodcast.com. Make sure you subscribe and make sure you check us out everywhere that you want to be, social media. We have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. I'm doing what you said, John. I'm everywhere you want to be, that's where you're going to see a little bit of the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:44

I would I would add one thing. I enjoy having conversations with business owners and troubleshooting, you know, where they can make little changes to improve their business. So if any of your listeners just want to reach out directly, John at the JPBusinessdacademy.com, and we can we can figure out if there's some things I can do to help their business grow.

Pete Shau 1:05:05

Well, you heard it there, guys. If you guys have any questions, hit up John or hit me up. Remember also that the newsletter is coming out and it is new to you. Everything that we talk about on there is not on the podcast. So it's something that we talk about, whether it's industry level, shed level, virtual RTO, it's wheel and tire, it's everything about rent to own. And we appreciate it. John, thanks for your time. And I would tell you guys as always, get your collections low to get your sales high. Have a great one.