
EPI 55: Know Yourself: Stay Small To Go Big!
EPI-55: Know Yourself: Stay Small To Go Big!
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Back Story Development
Done right, the micro creates the macro.
Quantum Physics people!
The small stuff is what builds the big stuff.
I recently bought two courses teaching how to market on LinkedIn, created by Justin Welsh.
As part of the process, Justin had me fine tune my back story.
This is your “elevator pitch” and is to be used any time anyone ever asks, “What do you do?”
Now, the interesting bit here is, I already HAD an incredible back story.
But another one’s been built since.
And my two backstories are intertwined
Briefly: I beat bipolar without using meds. What came before, during and in the handful of years after was all mind blowing.
Then I grew tired of what sharing my story was bringing me.
It’s been over 17 years since I considered myself bipolar. There hasn’t been anything left that in me that could be called that.
And sharing my story was bringing me people who were desperate and broke.
Not the ideal situation with which to build a career.
But I KNEW that the most powerful part of my entire story WAS the bipolar part!
Well, this all got sorted out a couple years ago, when I hired Rhonda Hess to help me see a way forward.
And hence, helping high-functioning bipolar people became the new career focal point.
Fast forward to now: Justin wanted me to fill in a template describing my back story.
And the way he suggested to do it was new to me.
And it unexpectedly helped me clarify, in the deepest, yet most succinct way yet, what my “new” back story was.
This refinement actually improved how I saw myself, sharpened who I already knew my new market to be, and gave me an all-around awareness that even forced a few changes to my website.
I became more aware!
And doing that is something I always espouse to others.
You don’t usually have to change too much to do better, to feel better. You just need a fresh look at what already exists and then act in accordance with your latest priorities.
NONE of that got said in the podcast! LOL
But what I did make clear was, the more specific you can get about who you serve and why (and be brutally honest about this), the bigger the effect will be on your overall attempts at success.
Transcript
Just click the “READ MORE” text below for the transcript!
Hey, this is Ken Jensen. I beat bipolar disorder in an all natural fashion back in the mid 2 thousands. And believe it or not, that’s not even the coolest part of my story.
What I learned through that process and what came next and how that applied to bipolar and why bipolar was ever even part of the process, was mind blowing to say the least.
Bipolar has hidden within its strengths. I’m gonna show you what I mean and how they’ve shown up in my life so you can do the same. Hello, bipolar prone folk. Welcome to the show.
This is episode 55. Know yourself. Stay small to go big. I was going through my morning routine and some ideas popped into my head and I had a record this show based on how strongly I felt about an idea that just popped into my head.
On a Saturday instead of Sunday, which will then buy me time to lift weights on Sunday. Conveniently. Not conveniently. Oh, with just less stress, and I’ll have to try to fit it in.
This show takes a lot of concentration. It’s not just the labor. It’s the concentration and I can’t lift prior. Because then I can’t think straight after because I’m all pumped up mentally and physically.
And doing the show puts me in kind of a zen state. Along with a slight amount of frustration that affects how well how much I’m willing to then go work out and and it eats up time.
Welcome to my little my little world of of what’s that word is picking any a thing, picking nanny, picking any.
Looked that up Google that little problems that that nibble at me sometimes and and add up to bigger problems if I don’t get a control of them.
Know yourself, stay small to go big. For years, I tried to build many businesses actually off of the skill sets I had or because of the the proximity to somebody who had the power to help me go big if I just help them do what they did.
Directly, like physically taking part in whatever they did because I was smart enough to do so.
The universe spanked me time and time again as it taught me, that’s not what I’m about. I’m the man behind the throne. My job is to motivate people who themselves are on some larger mission.
And in my case, bipolar prone people because I understand them best to help them go do big things that are either out of my pay grade or I’m not even interested in pursuing.
But I love watching you guys launch something or improve something you’re already in the middle of doing.
Being that you’re flavor with bipolar means you’re There’s gonna be something slightly unusual about the approach or the goal or the tools we use, and most definitely the people we interact with to build your thing.
I love that to no end. I love the artist personality. I love those kinds of people. They’re utterly fascinating. I don’t care who you are. Those are utterly fascinating people. You are utterly and hating people.
So I realized eventually, I’m at your side, Like a like in the military I’d be the sergeant major to the general you make the calls You have to come up with the plan but then I facilitate. That’s how I stay small to go big.
I do it vicariously through you so to speak. Everything I built on my own blew up in my face because it was all stuff I was good at. I basically approached it even though I was attempting to build businesses.
I was I was approaching it like I would any other job. Grit you know, Grint and Barrett are more like grit my teeth than Barrett. And it wasn’t you know, my heart wasn’t fully into it.
Sometimes I couldn’t always see that. Because because I’d I’d be excited about being part of somebody’s larger picture. And this takes a lot of this this takes a lot of teasing out of of details and subtle differences.
And mostly in my case, well, journaling journaling and meditation played a big part in that because sometimes you just gotta think. And sometimes you just got a vomit ideas on the paper just to see what your brain’s up to.
When you see it something changes and how you think about it. Can’t let stuff just rattle around in your head. You get nowhere with that. Shit. That’s part of what helped drive me into bipolar in the first place years ago.
You need to fine tune what you’re all about and I ended up not III recently had to do that yet again In a way I never had before, because I’m getting ready to do something huge on LinkedIn.
And partially Twitter. And I’m not a social media guy. Most most of what I’ve ever seen on social media does not appeal to me in the slightest. I get just as emotional as everybody else does about all the things.
But I realized that gain that only that not only gains me nothing. It tracks from what I’m trying to do with my life. It breaks my focus, and and and and I run down the same path everyone else does.
That lead to just a loss of time and energy and a gain of of bad feelings and and thought processes that ruin my day. Or if it’s on a positive angle, III entertain myself for who knows how many hours and and got no work done.
So I I over the years, I I just I just went away from I never did Twitter because that never appealed to me. Facebook just slowly angered me more by the day, and I realized I could just stop looking at it.
And I wouldn’t know anything about what anybody was doing or saying or writing. And they’re for my opinion of them would not be impacted at all by that trivial horse shit. And I could remain thinking nice things about people.
I just didn’t have to go look at this stuff that, like I just said, it’s just waste of time and a and a denigration of my good feelings and and my wellness really. My wellness bipolar prone folks. You want your wellness to increase.
Get the hell off of social media if all you’re doing on it is trolling and interacting on shit that you you you have no it’s not gonna change anything in your life. Other than the act of doing it, nothing’s gonna change for the better.
Now, I mentioned I’m gonna be back on LinkedIn and Twitter. It’s for marketing purposes in in large part. But LinkedIn in particular is professionals. I call it I call it the grown up platform We’re all in there doing business.
You see a little bit of some stuff that could be, you know, you’ll you’ll even see people complain. This is not face book? Why did you just share that horse shit? But that’s it’s really minimal.
And as you find people that resonate with you, And I suggest everybody does this. Your your I don’t know what they call it in LinkedIn. Your timeline becomes filled with stuff you actually want to see and is helpful.
So back to the topic of staying small that go big. I think that’s all I wanted to say about this. There was uploader little things and I knew I’d forget them and I did.
I swear to god 1 of these days, I’ll make a little itemized list. I’ve tried it. And somehow that breaks my attention too just looking at the list but we’ll we’ll see.
I’ll have to come up with some hybrid sit a deal with this because there’s different things I mean to tell you guys, and I just they get lost in the the making of the episode.
But I started saying about how I had to do a different version of knowing myself.
There’s a guy named just Justin Welsh, and he has a couple they’re they’re extensive, but they’re they’re simple enough that you can get your head around it easily easily enough.
He has a way of getting your personality and your brand and your information out to LinkedIn and Twitter and Twitter in this case.
And it starts with knowing your your backstory. Now my original backstory that I leaned on for years was how I fought and overcame bipolar without drugs. And I wrote a book about that. I was a public speaker about that.
And what it ended up becoming was a lot of bipolar people who were very deep in the illness and had no money and no support would come to me begging for help and answers and not be able to pay me to feed my family as I help them for free.
I was willing to do that for quite some time just because, well, 1, I didn’t realize what it what it was becoming.
I didn’t realize I was murdering myself. 2, You have to martyr yourself initially just to see where a thing leads. And 3, eventually, enough time, enough years had passed, that I got sick of talking about bipolar all the time.
I had I had other shit that interested me. I had other really good things going on in my life that I wanted to talk about and build upon.
And bipolar was like it just be it eventually just became compartmentalized. It was something that happened and yet It was no longer the main focus and yet it it underpinned everything about me. So I got stuck.
I got stuck for a few years, possibly more depending on how you look at it. Where I was trying to figure out how do I use my bipolar backstory. Without drawing people to me who I I really can’t help beyond the sharing of my information.
And I don’t get paid for the attempt. It’s good to help people and I give a lot of free help out all over the Internet a lot, and I’m glad to do it.
But I restructured everything in a way that I can do it and to where it doesn’t hurt me. It only builds up my credibility, builds up the karmic points, and and I I’ve set it up in such a way that I’m I’m more than glad to do it.
And it all leads to what I do on bipolar excellence dot com, which is where the money resides, which is where I can be hired to do things for people like you.
And it’s where I want my life to go because I then get paid literally to live the way I want. I’m going to talk to folks like you. No matter what, all the time. I have done so for many years.
You’re drawn to me. It’s not like every bipolar person within a 50 foot radius knows. You know, hey, there’s a bipolar or prone guy. It’s not that. But there’s just it’s a general flavor of person that’s attracted to me in real life.
And I love talking to those people. Lot of them don’t have any bipolar but there’s always some related something because particularly because I’ve been exposed to so much.
I’ve done so much. I learn fast. I get good at things quickly. I experience a lot. I pick up a lot of knowledge and experience and wisdom, and then I move on.
So when these people approach me, no matter what they say, I know a little something about some part of it to where I can be of of help or if nothing else just have a fulfilling, enriching, entertaining conversation, which That’s how I wanna live.
That’s a big part of how I wanna live, those conversations. But I can’t do it for free. Who da do you go to work for free? No. You expect to get paid no matter how much you love the job Take that paycheck away.
Let me know how much longer you hold that job. Let me know what you do and instead. You gotta get paid. So back to the original, how do I use that backstory?
So I had to come up with a new backstory and I did it following Justin Welch’s suggestion because then it clarifies how you’re gonna create content to appeal to the right people to know that you’re the guy to help them.
And I’m not gonna it would take too much time.
I’m not gonna go into, you know, what ended up writing for him, but his his process, which I will share this, it involved the obstacle the internal struggles the external struggles the change event the spark the guide and the result.
When I went through his first course, I wrote up my first version of what that was.
That was weeks ago. I’ve been busy doing stuff on the website and busy building out a lot of other things on LinkedIn that ate up a lot of my time. And I knew that I would have to refine that, you know, it was a first draft.
I’d have to refine it, which I just did last night. And I and I did it more than once. I refined it and refined it and refined it because you want it to be real simple.
And this is the story I will tell all the time to any anybody that’s interviewing me or even meeting me that wants to know what I’m about. They’ll get some version of this new story. And it tightened my focus in a way.
I I didn’t I didn’t see coming and I’m I’m so grateful because Nothing new was revealed to me. It was just a a way of clarifying this stage of my life that I I didn’t have at the ready until I had did what Justin told me to do.
It then informed how I edited the homepage on my website and it even changed what it is I give away for free.
To entice people to sign up for my newsletter so we can learn more about each other. Now I give away my whole wellness system that I used to sell. I give it away. It’s the same system that’s in my book.
It takes guts to be me, how an ex marine beat bipolar disorder. However, it’s it’s been edited before and updated for the times. If you do ever get a copy of that book, everything in it’s it’s good to go.
The basics, good to go. It’s just some details. I’ve learned some things. Some details change, my understanding of certain things changed. So I make that clear in the course.
And then I have videos in the course that go in in depth explaining what’s on the page and why and and adding my own my own life experiences to give context to why I put that stuff on that page. That’s all free now.
You go to bipolar excellence dot com and and just sign up for the newsletter and you’ll get that. You’ll be made a course member and knock yourself out. It’s I I know it’s highly valuable to buy polar people if you’re still suffering.
I cannot coach you through its use, but I can answer questions about it and I will I will respond sharing what I experience because that’s all I can ethically do. That’s all I want to do.
I’m not a therapist. As I learned when I got a big discovery when I became certified as a life coach some years back, few years back. I never knew there I didn’t know there was a difference between therapy and coaching.
And I was doing both, and it was a muddled a muddled result and I wasn’t happy. But therapy is when someone’s hurting and you’re just trying to bring them up to 0.
Coaching is you’re at 0 or more likely higher. You’re doing quite well. And now you’re getting cocky and you wanna do something huge and you need somebody familiar with that process to help you go be huge.
That is my sweet spot. I’ve been doing it for years anyway but until I got certified as a life coach I had no idea that there was a difference like that because there’s a lot of similarities between therapists and coaches.
I’m a coach. I got therapy potential in me, but I’m a coach. I will motivate the shit out of you.
I will take all your information and and boil it down into something that’s a little easier for you to make use of I will have insight you don’t currently have based on my experiences with getting well, building a business.
And what I’ve learned from people ahead of me, I’m a big distillery of information. I’m a big index of facts and resources and fresh perspectives.
And I wanted to somehow make clear that that’s where I was. Without upsetting the people that are just simply suffering from the illness and maybe based on something I wrote or expecting me to be this other thing that I really am not.
Even though I have pieces of it, I’m capable. It’s not it’s not what I am. It’s not what I wanna do. And you gotta do what you wanna do in this life. What else is the point? This was a years long struggle sorting this out.
And it it came to final completion with me trying to fill out my backstory the way this this man Justin Wells suggests you do. He’s on LinkedIn. Go find him if you’re if you’re on LinkedIn. If not, get on LinkedIn.
You need to be on LinkedIn. If you’re going after a big dream, you’re gonna need help. And and and from far more than just me. I’m gonna go on and on about what that all is and that’s not the point of this episode.
So I’m gonna end it right there and I’m so excited because that that point and a few others that I made tonight are they were very important to me, and I’m very excited that tomorrow now, I don’t have to put my focus on what’s the podcast gonna be?
I can put my focus on lifting. When I lift, I don’t just go into gym and lift.
It’s it’s whole process. It starts the night before when I write in my log book what I’m gonna do and I start I I sleep on it, and there there’s a whole thing I do. And it’s practically religious in nature.
And it takes just as much for me to do that right as does this podcast and all the other stuff I do online to help you guys. So I’m real happy that tomorrow that can be my sole focus tomorrow being a Sunday.
And my tit, I’m gonna end on my personal high note right there. Hope this was helpful. Let me leave you to run final thing. Alright? I’ve never felt like doing this before, but I’ve I’ve since been taught it’s it’s necessary.
If you go to my website and click on the podcast page, You’ll see or any other podcast episode. You’ll see a thing about leaving a review. I need Apple reviews. I need Apple reviews so more people can find out about me.
So if you’re digging the show, go on over to the site, please, and leave me a nice review about how listening to the show has helped you. I’d really appreciate that, but I’m I’m not gonna beg I’m in your head.
I’m helping you. If it moves you, do the right thing. I do it all the time. You guys do it for me, and that’s how we all get better together. Teamwork. Teamwork makes the dream work. Alright. Take care guys.