How to use your phone for business, without it using you
hi guys kurt provost here your guide to all things nu skin it has been a while since i last created a video on this channel been a bit busy and in that time you guys have been busy too because we have broken the 5 000 subscriber mark in fact as of uh last moment that i checked it is 5061 of you amazing people who are subscribed to my channel and tuning in getting some value from my content so thank you so much for being part of that thank you for watching the videos thank you for commenting thank you for all that you add to this and thank you for your questions which help inspire me to create content specifically for you now today's video is it's it's gonna be a little different it's always challenging to to jump back in creating video content after a period of not creating anything at least on this platform because you you feel like you need to create something really important and really big and special you can't just talk about any old thing to start up again so uh i found the topic for today because i've been doing something a little unusual for the past week or so and it's really helped me a lot and i think it could help a lot of people so i'm going to title this video uh something along the lines of how to use your phone to build a business without your phone using you so i guess the best place to kick this off is with a neurotransmitter that goes by the name of dopamine now you may have heard of dopamine before it's uh it's becoming quite a popular phrase and people associate dopamine with pleasure and that's that's kind of correct i mean it is present when we're experiencing pleasure but it has more to do with uh guiding our wants desires and motivation to to do things so it's more oriented around that around the future whereas there are other neurotransmitters like uh serotonin like uh oxytocin like uh gaba these ones are they're more in the here and now they're more helping you with experiencing fulfillment i guess a bit of peace and zen and satisfaction with what you're doing in the present moment so let's explore dopamine because dopamine is an integral part of us dopamine in itself isn't good or bad it's just a chemical that is released in our body primarily in our through our nervous system and primarily in the brain and without dopamine we probably wouldn't get a lot done now there are certain things that release more dopamine than other things and if you think about how we've spent most of our time as homo sapiens as human beings we've spent most of our time as uh cavemen if you looked at all right this is all the time that human beings have been around or homo sapiens have been around then about that much would be being cavemen and about that much would be uh a farmer in an agricultural society and about this this tiny little slither of my pinky would be the modern uh technology driven society that we exist in today and we still have the same brain that is largely uh optimized for that cavemen style of living except we find ourselves in modern times and that is a blessing and a curse because as a caveman sugary foods fatty foods really protein rich and dense foods would elicit a dopamine response finding a mate having sex that would elicit a really strong really powerful dopamine response because these are super important things for a caveman to do you need to be motivated enough to go out there and forage and go through the trials and tribulations of hunting some actual food that could potentially harm you as well and many other things that could harm you it'd be much easier just to stay in your cave and uh you know lay around and sleep all day but you had to be motivated enough to get up get out there and get after it whether that was some prey whether it was some food or whether it was a mate so whatever it may be dopamine was vital in helping us get motivated enough to get out there and do that now you fast forward to today well we still have that same brain we still have that same dopamine response except the things that elicit those response are way easier for us to attain today so if we want some sugary food we just open up the fridge or we un peel off the wrapping of the candy bar and shove it in our mouths there's very little hardship between the wanting of something the motivation and desire to do something and the receiving of it the problem with that is is that we have no context within our brain our brain is amazing but it doesn't process context of a situation it just wants something whether it's good for us or bad for us it wants it on a biological and chemical level now we do have a conscious mind that is able to discern what is good and what is bad for us so we can feel you know guilty if we shove that chocolate bar down down in our throat or a couple of chocolate bars and then a tub of ice cream we will feel not so good afterwards because we realize that wasn't the best long term decision however dopamine still kicks in and you want to do it again and you find yourself making these bad decisions again in the future it's this this cycle of sorts same thing happens with trying to find a mate i mean we can open up our phones and just on tinder or social media we can see more people than we ever would have seen in an entire life span of a caveman in about 10 15 minutes of just scrolling through things or watching a movie or whatever it may be and just have a think about the impact that that has on our brain the impact like the the sensory overload that that has and the dopamine overload that that has on our brain we're completely fried the issue with dopamine is that it's kind of like alcohol in that if you have one glass of wine one drink and you barely ever drink that's going to be enough you're going to be drunk you'll be having a great time you'll be feeling all right you're a cheap date and that's fantastic but if you drink every single day then you're going to need ever higher quantities of alcohol to reach the same high that you would with that one glass if you didn't do it regularly you see it's a bar that just keeps getting pushed up and there's a new standard and as you keep pushing that up you need more and more of something well dopamine is exactly the same and that's why my drugs are so illicit drugs are so dangerous because they are highly addictive they are if you look at cocaine and heroin they have ungodly they stimulate ungodly amounts of dopamine or dopamine receptors within our brain and that explains why it is so easy to get addicted to these substances thank god they are exorbitantly expensive and there are social constraints that try and limit the addiction of that otherwise we'd all just be snorting cocaine all the time because it releases that much dopamine but there are a lot of other things that have been flying under the radar that release just as much dopamine but they are not they don't have those social constraints like illicit drugs do things like computer games they are incredibly addictive incredibly effective at hitting those dopamine centers because it it's an adventure there's all this stuff happening it's it's entertainment uh it's a release of sorts and it creates all this dopamine same thing for social media you know the psychologists have really found their moment in history because all their ideas and concepts all the cutting edge psychology of influence and persuasion has been funneled into your device i'm pointing at this because i record this on my phone and the smartphone that is in your hand that you're probably watching this from is designed from the notifications the sounds that it makes the the images that they show to you the lighting up of notifications it reminds me of i actually grew up in clubs clubs in australia like bowling clubs and depending on where you are in the world it's not like a nightclub type thing it's more where elderly people will go and all sorts of people will go and and they'll drink beer and they'll it's more an excuse to drink beer and gamble so we have these things called pokey machines and kind of looks like las vegas you know the casinos it's a watered-down version of that they're slot machines so i was very young when i entered clubs because my father was a manager of multiple clubs and so i would visit my father at work and i would hear this kind of circus music off in the distance and all these flashing exciting lights and i i was really drawn to that area and that's where the the poker machines are now by law uh miners are not allowed in that area so i never got into it but i would walk past it i would walk close enough to see the people in there just uh sitting there and you know pulling the lever that that was the really old one but mainly they would just tap buttons and the screen would refresh and all these things were twirling and and i was confused by that but i was drawn to it because everything that was happening there draws us to it it's just like a carnival except this was for adults unfortunately i well fortunately i guess i saw the people who were putting money just 50 notes 100 notes into these machines and just sitting there like this just just they look like zombies to me as a kid and i guess in a sense they kind of were zombies because scientists have conducted research on dopamine in rats and what they did with this particular study was they increased the dopamine or amount of dopamine within the rat if they touched a certain button or a lever and what happened is the the rat would hit that button get this release of dopamine it's like oh that was that was nice i like that i want i'm motivated to do more of that now because i know it's going to be this kind of feel-good thing and so the motivation goes up so they keep hitting it they keep liking it but they need to hit it more and more and more because that rising bar that rising tide and what happened inevitably was they lost interest in water they lost interest in food they lost interest in mates and friends in in their relationships they lost interest in the surroundings and they would just hit that button until they collapsed from exhaustion now the researchers reversed this study and they inhibited the receptors for dopamine so that they weren't getting enough dopamine this time so it's the opposite of the original experiment and what happened to the rat well it got super lethargic it would just kind of stroll around and lay around most of the time it wouldn't move it it wasn't even motivated enough to go and drink some water or eat it would only eat or drink if the researchers put food in its mouth and then it would chew it and for our business here i guess you can see some some parallels there if you've been in business for a while perhaps you have had some team members who have just been you know you've done everything for them and they've got a sale let's just say they've got someone they did a post or they've got a friend who would really love the product but for whatever reason they just can't seem to get around to collecting the sale and it's really frustrating because you're like everything is there it's on a plate for you why are you not taking the the one step towards it to to improve your life you know everything has been made easy for you why not also move towards what it is that you say you want but uh they can't because and i believe dopamine has a lot to do with it there's there's other things as well about habits and and what it is that they actually want in their life but we are slaves to number one our habits but number two to the the chemical processes within our body and most people are just so overwhelmed with dopamine that or their receptors are kind of a bit let's just say we've had we've over indulged and it's messed us up a bit and that is why that's that's detailing the problem i probably went too long into detailing the problem but that is why it's important to have a dopamine detox what is a dopamine detox it is very simple it is cutting out all those things that currently create pleasure in your life or that excitement or all the things you're kind of motivated to do at the moment and all the things that have a hold on you that you don't like when you look at it like the way that i opened up social media this is why i did it personally is because the last two years i have i've found that the situation on a world scale has been oppressive has been all-consuming for me it's it's been something that i've just kind of opened myself up completely to all the latest news i've been reading all these reports uh all these clinical studies all this stuff uh about what's going on in different parts of the world and in my own country and it's all been too much i've become a little bit addicted to it and it it messed up my ability to focus my ability to look into the future with optimism look into the future uh with clarity and hold a strong vision and if you can't hold a strong vision then this business will be challenging for you because that is a large part of it is is looking into the future seeing where you want to be and holding on to that image and then taking steps every single day towards that image of who you want to be and what you want to have and what you want your world to look like now if you cannot hold on to that then there's a problem it's just you kind of maybe you do activity but you're doing activity in all these different directions not in this one focused direction and as such by the end of the year you look around and you haven't moved you've just been spinning in circles that's a problem so i was feeling that issue and i i needed a break from this i needed to remove the hold that the news had on me that social media had on me because i would i would end up scrolling for half an hour hours at a time looking at cat videos looking at funny videos just looking at random unimportant stuff that does not add to my life in any way shape or form and yet i was wasting immense amounts of time and that was making me really unhappy so that's the ironic thing about dopamine is it it's not necessarily going to make you happy in fact it's quite often the opposite so most people need a reset i needed a reset so i just cut everything out now you can do this in one day you can do it over a week you could do it over a month or you could do it for a lifetime i mean ultimately the the best way is you just delete all social media apps you you throw away your phone you go buy a nokia that has no internet access and can receive texts and calls and you're done that's that's sweet you just focus on real human interaction you could probably still have a youtube channel or something and create content of course in different ways but we don't really need a lot of the the stuff that we have on our phone right now so getting rid of it is a huge step forward however here's the caveat we build our businesses our new skin business is largely built through social media so how exactly do we have a dopamine detox if we want to use social media to build our business well this is how i did it and just before i dive into that i want you to appreciate that if you were eating out at a five-star restaurant every day of the week you would grow acclimatized to that level of quality and if someone offered you a plain bowl of rice while you're eating your you know michelin star restaurant meal you would say no thank you you would reject that offer because you're getting way more dopamine from you have a standard of dopamine hits that that bowl of rice just wouldn't fulfill now if we switch that around a bit and you've been stranded on an island for weeks on end with no access to anything except some rain water and someone offers you that same bowl of plain rice that is gonna set off so much dopamine for you because you've kind of been reset because you really want that you're really motivated to eat then and that's the whole idea of a dopamine reset is take a step back remove yourself in an extreme way from all the things that control you currently so that then you have control over them and you can decide what it is that you do or do not want to be part of your life so here's how i did it i decided that first and foremost with social media i would have no notification sounds i cut out all sounds silenced everything and what that meant is i also got rid of visual cues on my phone so notifications no longer pop up except for a few specific apps and i'll get into that in a moment but what that meant is that i would have to go to those specific apps to see if there's a notification like if someone has commented on a post if someone has shared something if i've been tagged in something all that that sort of thing you don't need to be notified about that you can check your phone at certain intervals during your day to see what's happening now i will get into that a little bit later but first two the only thing that i am notified about are messages that are coming through two different places for me so the first one is facebook messenger and that is because most of my communication comes through there now if you can redirect all communication through just one app that would be brilliant figure out if it's going to be whatsapp instagram messenger facebook messenger maybe email something like that and i receive emails as well because of you guys youtube so uh you guys tend to email me quite a bit and i uh check them and respond to them so they are the only notifications but there's definitely no sound happening there and that cuts out a lot of the unnecessary distractions when i'm working on something i can just focus on that one thing it cuts out the multitasking because whenever you get interrupted on a work schedule it takes time to get back into that workflow and it will usually take longer than the actual interruption the interruption might only go for a couple of seconds might be ding ding and you check something your mind goes there and 10 seconds later you're back on task but it's going to take a few minutes if not much longer i've heard people saying that it could be 5 10 15 minutes before you're actually back into a deep work state so make sure that there are no interruptions and as a result of that i have been working on my laptop rather than on my phone where i would normally access social media and i installed two plugins or one plugin actually and it covered all of them and that was the news feed eradicator on google chrome you just install that turn that on and then when you would be working on facebook then there's no news feed so you don't get lost in this rabbit hole and i would have my phone on either flight mode or on silent and so it's sitting beside me if i need it but i'm not getting tempted because there's no sounds there's no notifications that uh are trying to drag me back down that vortex meanwhile i am working on social media and the idea with social media is you can still use it but use it to create things not to consume things you see there's a key difference there use social media to post something use social media to create a video and share it use social media to prospect use social media to follow up with someone to respond to comments to engage with people whatever it may be but do not use social media to consume so there may be people watching this going well i already do that fantastic that means that you're disciplined you're focused you have the ability to do that that is brilliant i didn't have the ability to do that because i was so uh saturated with dopamine i needed to reset it so that is the work portion and that's how it worked in with nu skin the other things that i did was i cut out all alcohol all sugar uh most socializing i did have two guests come within the week that i was there but what was fantastic about that is because i wasn't checking my phone all the time i wasn't conscious of social media i wasn't conscious of what's going on in the world i was just focused on the person or the people and so i could really enjoy their company and we had a much higher level of conversation a much higher quality conversation than normally would happen and it was fantastic and what i noticed was that my my sense of humor has improved a lot my mood has improved so much and my vision as well i can actually well my focus my ability to focus on something is is going through the roof and that's something i really needed help with and my vision for the future is looking brighter and brighter and also i can see it and i can hold on to that and that is so important for our business so that that is why i'm sharing this today because i think there will be people watching this who think uh who perhaps are in the same scenario same situation as what i've been in and if you're not then you've probably got team members who are or you know some family members around you who are and you can perhaps share this video they may not be building the business but it's still uh applicable for life in general and so i just focused i allowed a few different things number one was i wanted to sleep a lot i really wanted to improve my sleep habit because i was going to bed late i was waking up later and that's a vicious cycle so going to bed my phone shuts down completely just automated i i've set that up so the 9 pm it's shut down and then i've got no choice i can go and read a book because i allow that it has to be an older book preferably or a non-fiction book if i if i'm looking to learn something but i get a lot from older fiction because great stories have so many lessons in them lessons in psychology lessons in strategy lessons in in just understanding human beings and myself much better and lessons in creativity that's for sure all of which we need for our business so i encourage you to read as much as possible if you don't read nonfiction go out there and read nonfiction there are brilliant books thinking well that's yeah think and grow rich rich dead poor dad the richest man in babylon how to win friends and influence people these are absolutely brilliant foundational books that i highly encourage you to go and start reading if you do read a lot of nonfiction start reading fiction because that just will open up your mind in a totally different way so i would read in the evening so there's no screen time i'd go to bed around 9 9 thirty ish read for half an hour to an hour then i'd be really tired and i would sleep all the way through till six in the morning at which time i'd get up and go and stretch exercise trying to meditate i'm not that good with meditation but if you can apply meditation into this i think you will be absolutely winning and then i study languages so at the moment i'm studying russian and that's progressing very slowly but at least i can focus and get a bit more committed on that and then the other things i allow in my life is time in nature and work that's it so if i'm not doing one of those things i'm doing one of the other things there's no time for social media other than when i'm actually working the other thing is turn off your tv one of the biggest challenges for me was that every time i would sit down for a meal let's say lunch or dinner time because i work from home well i'd want to watch something while i was eating i didn't want to feel unproductive or kind of wasted time just sitting there chewing which is a strange thing you should probably be very conscious when you're eating a meal i mean a lot has gone into sacrificing either animals or plants and resources to provide that food for you we should probably be gracious and conscious of that meal but nonetheless i would watch things and inevitably i'd be watching something on youtube or i'd watch something on netflix and i'd finish lunch and i'd keep watching whatever it was and i get completely derailed for the rest of the day or the rest of the night and nothing would happen so instead because i know i'm not super strong i flipped it so that i would still watch something while eating except it was only one thing and that is interviews with top earners within the network marketing profession and that has been absolutely brilliant there are hundreds if not thousands of interviews out there with leaders from all different companies but there's a ton of interviews from leaders within nu skin and you learn so much from these people who are building this business at an elite level if that's where you want to go then i really encourage you to invest the time as much time as you can to absorbing every bit of wisdom that those top leaders have so that kind of wraps up my uh dopamine detox and how it is that i'm beginning to rebuild my business using my smartphone without the phone using me i hope that has been valuable for you i hope that you gain some tips and insights from that if you haven't subscribed as i said at the beginning please do subscribe or at least hit the like button that's a great free way that you can promote this channel or support this channel and leave me a comment if you enjoyed this if you have any questions about anything i discussed in here we can clarify in the comments if you need to contact me my details are at the end and i look forward to chatting to you and seeing you in the future my name is kurt provost i am your guide to all things new skin i'll see you in the next video you
2022-04-04 18:15
