3 Mental Models Holding you Back

Aug 4

Written By Andrew Woodbury

Three models to avoid and one to use instead

Read time: 3 minutes

Here’s our TTT for this week on how to grow your online teaching business.

What is TTT? A Tip, Takeaway, and Task. On Thursday.

Today’s read will take you about 3 minutes.

Enjoy!

Tip: Avoid these three mental models

New York Yankee great Yogi Berra once said that “baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.” While his math may not have been perfect, his idea was on point.

In baseball if you fail 70% of the time, you go to the hall of fame. In entrepreneurship, if you fail 70% of the time, 30% of what you do is better than the majority of people.

Likely the most difficult aspect of being a teacherpreneur is overcoming those inherent failures. That is, flipping it around and not seeing the 70% of things that didn’t work, but rather the 30% of things that did.

When you don’t have a boss giving you direction, you need to have the discipline to move your business forward on your own. When you don’t simply follow instructions, you have to develop and implement your own beliefs in public.

And this is tough.

With this in mind, there are three mental models that we find hold back many teacherpreneurs.

It's the 3 P model:

The Preacher.

The Prosecutor.

The Politician.

We’ll get into these below. Which one do you most identify with?

Takeaway: The 3 P model holds you back

The Preacher:

This person holds deeply-rooted beliefs and is usually convinced they are correct. They tend to not be open to feedback and believe their way of doing things to be the best.

The Prosecutor:

This person continually recognizes flaws in others' reasoning. They try to prove others wrong.

The Politician:

This person tries to win over an audience and is constantly looking for approval.

One or more of these are common in most people and at the same time hold back a potentially successful business from moving forward.

To move forward, we must consider the fact that what we know could be wrong, be open that what others are doing is right, and not look for approval but rather to help and to serve (and in turn attract the right kind of client).

This is why we recommend adopting a fourth type of mindset: The Scientist.

Task: Become a scientist instead

The scientist:

- tests the boundaries of their own understanding
- doubts what they know
- is curious about what they don't know
- updates their opinions in light of new data and information
- views change as a process

In his book "Think Again," Adam Grant shows that entrepreneurs who adopt a scientific model over a model of control and stubbornness grew over 1000x faster.

A task for you this week is to evaluate which "P" you are more of and how to involve more scientist in what you do.

And keep moving forward. The best plan for success is consistency. And this is mental. Yogi Berra had that part right.

We hope this helps.

See you again next week.

Leo, Andrew, and Mike