This week we revisit the final part of Gareth Timmins interview. Everyone talks about setting goals. Very few people talk about what happens when the motivation disappears halfway through, and that is the honest bit of this conversation. Gareth Timmins, former Royal Marine and author of Becoming the 0.1%, sits down with Simon Bowkett to pull apart why big targets on their own do not keep anyone going. There is a great story in here about the book Simon could not finish for nearly four years, until someone broke it down into 500 words a day and started chasing him every Monday. There is also the flip side, the flat feeling that shows up after a record month or a big win, and what to do about it. Practical, honest and relevant whether you are chasing a sales target or building something of your own.
- The difference between an outcome goal and a process goal, explained properly
- How a 60,000 word book became 500 words a day, and why that worked
- Focusing on failure instead of success, and why it kept Gareth in training
- Why the flat spell after a big win catches out good managers and good people
- Four or five small wins a day, and preparing today to set up tomorrow
- Sticking to what you believe when the feedback is not kind
- Why one bad review gets all the attention and what to do with it
- The books that changed Gareth’s thinking, including Outliers and The Slight Edge
Gareth Timmins is a former Royal Marine, author of Becoming the 0.1% and founder of the 0.1 clothing brand. His second book lands next July. He speaks at conferences and events on discipline, goal setting and what it takes to keep going when it stops being enjoyable.
Worth a listen on the drive in if you are working towards something this quarter and need it to still be alive in six weeks.
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visitwww.symcotraining.co.uk
Hi and welcome to another episode of Selling in the Motor Trade. In partnership with Kizana, improve your margins with real-time, data-driven, retail valuations backed by the largest rule of data set in the UK. There are an evidence-based guide valuations for main dealers, car suit markets and independence, along with SIMCO training, where we took about training in the real world, what's happening in the market today, not 10 to 15 years ago. Together, we're going to share tips and ideas on how to sell more cars, improve your service and parts operation, and generally put more profit into your department, dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Boca, or some of you might already know me as Skippy. Firstly, I just want to say thank you for the people who died right from the beginning of this, because we're past 250 episodes now, and interviewed so many great leaders in the motor trade. Thank you for taking the time. For people who are new to this, please, I actually just subscribe. You can't believe what it does to the algorithm and gets this podcast out to as many people in motor trade as we can. Listen, you're world now, because a lot of people listen to this, they're going to think, how do I take all of this military training, the self-discipline into, I don't know, their personal life, like personal fitness, their personal finances or business. So I want to explore this, and your life now, you took lots about goal setting and getting people to focus on what they want, and I want to open this up now about visualization. You visualize the goal setting, and the goal should be smart, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timed. The reason why I say that is I wrote a book myself, and that book in our family was called that fucking book, because Gareth, it took three and a half years, maybe four years of my life, and I just couldn't get it written, I couldn't get it finished, I had no self-discipline. There's a lovely lady called Deb Jenkins, working for the publisher, who said, oh, love, you need some goals. I mean, hold on, I teach goal training for a living, I understand goals. And she said something to me. She said, ah, do you have an outcome goal, not a process goal. I said, what? She said, you see it finished, don't you? Because I've done all the visualization stuff, I've seen it, I've seen the title, I've seen it on the bookshelf, I've seen it was sold there. She said, you've got an outcome goal, not a process goal. What do you mean? She said, well, how many thousands of words is this book going to be? I don't know, that's thick. She said, that's 60,000 words. She said, right, you got to do this in six months, that's 10,000 words you need to give me every month. That's two and a half thousand words you need to give me every week. That's 500 words a day you need to do. So you need to get to me every Monday morning, you need to give me two and a half thousand words if you don't. And by the way, I love it a bit, but I said, bloody hell, I've got to give these bloody words if I don't, she's going to beat me up. So I want to explore this because I wouldn't have got that written and it transformed our business if it wasn't for her beat me up and get me to go into a process goal, not an outcome goal. So then I started thinking, well, hold on, does visualization work? I've seen someone like in Sporting Worlds, a Lewis Hamilton, turned around and said, well, I think visualization's a lot of shite, actually, he doesn't believe it. When you get a visual belief, but you talked about something I've never heard about before. You didn't focus on the visualization, the outcome goal. You focused on something else, Thalia, and I want to get your take on it because I loved it. I hadn't seen it this way. And can you give me your take on goal setting? Yeah. So I, and again, I've done lots of research on this, which is kind of going to book two, which I've called like inverted thinking, which is like obviously looking back through time from where you currently are. I think that all contemporary understanding and research tells you to load value onto your end goal because that is ultimately, you know, during that process why you want to know why you're doing it and whatnot. The problem with that is, is that when you become fatigued or burnt out because you're chasing down this particular endeavor, you lose your motivation. I lost my motivation so many times throughout Romarine's training, and I wanted that more than anybody. And there were times in that where I just didn't want to be there anymore, and I want to come home. Even at like week 26, we're like six weeks left. That far into really, that far into you're thinking of I've had enough. I just, well, I don't want to fucking do this anymore. I don't want to be here. They were only 10 for it, but it would have been enough. I don't have other kind of cognitive tools. People make decisions on the future in the moment when they're fatigued, when they're tired, when they haven't been to sleep, when they're cold, when they're wet, and the leaves. So I've kind of encountered out before I went in, and as a result, I really, really depressed as to like what the options were on the table. I lived in a little mining village up and off and whatnot, and there were no opportunity whatsoever. You went to work, you weren't a very, very small amount of money, you predominantly lived in a really, like a bog-standard house, and the rest of your money went on being in the pub. And that life just depressed me massively. So I didn't want to re-inherit that. So I just absolutely focused on failure and just thought I do not want to re-inherit that. I also don't want to validate negative opinion. So all these people that said, oh, we'll see you in a month, you'll be back in a couple of weeks. I'm making it. When my motivation went, there's a kind of a backstop really. I landed there and I were like, well, what's your option? And it was like, well, I could go on. And every time I got, I arrived at, I could go home. I would quickly remember what I was due to inherit because I've been there, I'd ruminated in that for some time. So that was still raw. But also, I knew that if I went home, these people would be validated and they'd have the last laugh. And I absolutely, I couldn't have had that. So for me, it provided such a rigid anchor of stability at the final stage of me, like, not wanting to be there anymore. And as a consequence, mate, I kind of, there were times when I were like doing it and I thought, I don't even want to fucking do this anymore. But I thought, well, what's the alternative? And quickly over time, I mean, motivation came back. And I thought, well, I love this, I'm going to, I'm going to do this. And then I'd kind of, I'd arrive back there, but every time I arrived back there, I'd visualise what failure looked like. And every single time I visualise what failure looked like, I didn't want it. And that kept me in. Yeah, it's just, I've not really heard that concept before, it's one of those things that I think, have I done that in my life? I started Simcoe Training 23 years ago. I remember, distinctively, my manager at the time saying, you can't run your own sales training company. And I can remember saying, yeah, I'll bloody show you, OK? And I think in my life, maybe, now, again, I've swallowed all the books and visualisation and focus on the training company built and what it looks like, and I suppose, is it both Gareth? I think you've got to, you've got to use a mixture of both, it comes down to like dualist thinking, like parallel thinking, where you have to hold in your mind to kind of irrational beliefs, one way you've got 100% belief in yourself, but another element of it where you fully acknowledge and believe and you fully acknowledge and come to terms of the fact that there's a lot of elements that are out of your control that could sabotage your journey, but it's whether at that point you want to kind of fall victim to that and subscribe to abject failure, which is you kind of doing your own legs, or whether you're going to persevere and get around it, but ultimately the people that found success and they were the most successful, they had dualist or parallel thinking, where we were able to hold to contrast in beliefs at the same time. In your business life now, do you write your goals down, do you know where you're going to be in 12 months, 5 years time, do you still do that, do you look at that visualisation stuff? I do, it's only recently, probably this last 18 months really, that I've not wrote down some like short, medium, long term goals that I want to achieve, only because like becoming the number one percent came out in 2021, and then almost when that came out I wrote down a model in the back of a taxi for a cycle of mindset that I felt that you encountered by being outside of your comfort zone and having a growth mindset, so I've been working on that for the past nearly three years, and that's coming out next year, but that's kind of all consumed to me, so I've been like kind of on this journey of getting a publishing offer, getting a deal, writing the damn thing and then getting it out, so I think once that's probably done, which is due to be final drafts during December, I'll start writing down some goals that I want to kind of take down again next year and the years to come. But again, I just love the concept on focus on the failure, because I suppose when it's cold and wet and people have to get up and train for that marathon, it's the failure of not doing the training, and I'll just add this as well, it's so easy to look back at the past we're roasting to glasses, if you don't invest in that, you can quite easily go into something really difficult and think you know what, I'm quite happy to retake on that life, that previous life, and I always kind of like in talks, I like in this to like a bit like it's a bit like a faulty relationship, you split up with a partner and you have a period of, I don't know, single explanation or you get into another relationship, and all of a sudden you think you know what, that wasn't really that bad, that relationship, I might have probably go back to my ex, and it's not until you get with the ex that you realise why you left, and you can fall victim to that, so it's really important to really dissect and introspect and visualise just and get a really accurate gauge of what you stand to inherit when you go on an acquisition of to attain a goal, because when it gets tough it's so easy to go back. Yeah it is, and that goal isn't working out, going back to a relationship, or writing book number two, because you went through the pain of writing book number one, trying to get publishing deals and so forth, it's difficult, lots of rejection I imagine, lots of no, and then you're going in and doing it again, but you don't have that failure that you can draw back on to motivate you to do book two, because book runs a success, book runs go very very well there, and yeah do you have any other tips for, I suppose I'm drummers, let's take someone who, I don't know, they are trained for a bathroom, let's talk about that, they are building a business and they go speak to that next client, and they don't want to, and it's easier just to go, you know what, it's Friday afternoon, it's five past five, I just want to go to the pub, okay, any tips to keep people up and on that you've go through to get it. Yeah I mean I just saw was, I just gained like comfort and an element of kind of motivation and desire really from knowing that the vast majority are going to the pub, and I'm not, I'm staying disciplined to what I need to do, yeah I'm not, I'm not a complete disciplinarian and lived this really rigid, absolutely not, but I make sure throughout the day I've got maybe four or five wins within the day, where I know the positive success behaviours, and if I've hit them then I can, I'm quite happy and I can kind of deviate off slightly for a couple of hours, but I'm always kind of, I am always looking at how you can prepare my current day to set me up for success the following day, okay, you know what I mean, that's how I always work, and I just, I kind of just, I'm just always remained very consistent and just try to be, try to be better every day, it's kind of where I'm currently at. So Garth, is there some sort of post-completion lull, maybe that's what I'm looking at because you've gone through this 34 weeks of training, you've got there, okay, and you must want to relax, the reason why I say that in the business world, I see so often where I deal with a group, a manager, they've had the best month they ever had, they've had the best year they ever had, okay, and then they almost go and say, ah, we've made it, now I want to ask you that because you clearly not done that with the success of your first book, you're straight into the book too, and did you find any sort of post-completion lull when you finished your training? Yeah, I did retraining mate, I had a, I had a, I finished that and I was just like, I've made it, I've done it now, is it almost like that? Yeah, I've kind of made it, I've done it and I mean that lasted probably two weeks, and then I just started thinking, right, what am I going to do now? The problem that I had with that was, is like, once you've done that, what can you do to basically top that really? So I had a period of being like quite lost in terms of what I wanted to do and challenged myself on for a number of years, probably, and I were like, you know, probably in a bit of a comfort zone where we're riding up the back of it, and that will potentially like quite dangerous, but I will say this, like, whatever I've achieved in my life, it's always been a massive anti-climax, I've always been massively underwhelmed by everything that I've ever done, and I've come to learn only recently, whether it's the journey that I enjoy, it's the journey that I love, I love the journey, because that's where you've got the growth, you're becoming something, you're adding something to your bow, and it's almost like when you get to the very end of it, you naturally, I mean, I can become quite depressed, and I've done some research on it, of which I've added into book two, and what I've kind of found is that like all like high achievers, and I'm not by any means put myself into this category, being modest here, but all I all I achieve is you over the over forward project into the future, and they rationally misjudge or add too much weight onto it, so what winning is going to do in terms of fulfilment, happiness, emotional regulation, whatever, and what you find is that because your mindset's so engaged and you're optimised on that journey over a period of time with behavioural adjustment and whatnot and your habits, is that when you do reach the end of something, the only place to go is down. You can't maintain that euphoric high, you can't maintain that mindset optimisation or that prescription of thinking, once you get to the tip of the mountain, once you've summited the mountain, the only place to go is down, and that obviously means going into kind of some form of mental illness. Yeah, it's got a very good friend who will be listening to this podcast, and you know who you are, sold his business for multiple millions, a lot, and I said to this person, it must be over the moon, and you know what, he was, he loved it, Garth, but two got 12 months down the track, he said skip that sorry, they call me Skippy Garth, because of Australian accent, he said, this sounds stupid, but I feel half depressed now, I don't know what to do, he's sold, he's got like millions of the bank, he's got everything he knows what to do with, and it's like, see, he starts again, is it right, I'm going again, because it's what you said there, it's the journey that he loves. Yeah, we need a purpose, right, all human beings need a purpose, and I think once you remove that purpose, once the stimulus has been removed, it's like what next, is this it, and I've always been like that, I've always been like, what is this, Alexander Volkonoski, your Aussie UFC champion, he did an interview recently, he lost to the Russian guy for a second time, he did an interview after him, there'd been massive criticism on him for him taking the fight against him at two weeks notice, and they were saying like, why did you take the fight, what careless, like he was saying, yeah, maybe he said, I've got to be honest, I took the fight because I can't keep still, and it's almost like, for my own mental health, I've got to be either in a fight camp, or I've got to be engaged in the process of the fight, and I found it just absolutely fascinating, that you think that these people, I've got it all kind of worked out, and by default of some of the taboo jobs that they do, are some of the things that they've achieved, that the resilient of the victim withstand the day-to-day stresses and pulls when really, there's a lot going on there. There is fascinating, actually, it's fascinating that people have it all, but it's the strive, that's what really motivates us, listen, with your book, I can't wait to get book number two, and I hope I can get a copy of that soon there, next year you said it's coming out, yes, July. July next year, cool, okay, but listen, in book one, mastering the basics was a theme that I picked up throughout it, okay, get the basics right and looks after everything else, can I ask, is there any examples in your post-military career that your mindset and get the basics right has really helped you, and maybe in your training or organisation, your keynote speaking that you're doing the clothing line, is there any examples that you have there that has really set you up in good stead? Absolutely, so I set like 0.1 up on the back of the book really, because people like in demand for t-shirts, they ask me if I were doing t-shirts, like a peril to do with the book and whatnot, and I set up like 0.1 and it's kind of, we've teamed up only recently looking towards next year with a really like a prominent fitnesswear company, manufacturer, but I just added attention to detail, attention to detail into everything, and I think it sounds quite flippant and everybody knows what attention to detail is, but when you look at what props it up, it's like self-discipline, it's making sure that everything's kind of on point and process driven and everything's right and no stones left on turns, you're not quitting corners, and I think when you inject that into everything that you do across your marketing strategy, how the brand looks, your brand connectivity and all stuff like that, you're going to be successful, it's going to be a success, it's going to be a success and that goes for like anything, anything that you do, just do it to the best of your ability, thorough to the best of your ability and it'll pay dividends. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about how do you get your inspiration from on whatever, people who are listening, most people listen to this podcast going for a run or driving to work or something like that, and they won't go to see this, but I can see there's a tattoo on your arm, it looks like Muhammad Ali, I think, it is, I wanted to ask some of your heroes in your life, who have you looked up to, it's got to be Muhammad Ali, I'm guessing to start with there, why him to start with and anyone else specifically? Yeah, I mean, Muhammad Ali, nothing to do with boxing really, it would just is, I just loved how he believed in something and he wasn't willing to like be anything other than what I believed in and he stuck so strongly to that that he lost everything and got put in jail and I just really loved that example of just just being yourself and sticking to what you believe in and just knowing that having that confidence in knowing that this is me, do you know what I mean, and I'm going to be me and regardless of what anybody else is saying, I'm not going to fall victim to social pressures and stuff like that, so I really loved that and that's why I got that tattoo because I just thought that it's just to remind me sometimes that when you do get a bit of a negative kind of opinion, which sometimes the book does draw on stuff and when you stick your head above the parapet, basically and you step outside of your comfort zone, you open yourself up to various opinions and whatnot and it's just for me to say that look, it's cool, it's all right, this is exactly where you should be. I'm glad you said that, I look at the Amazon reviews on our book out there, I'm sure you do something and it's like there's so many lovely comments everywhere and it's like five stars everywhere but you're home in on that one of them and they say, oh, I'm a chapter eight when he said he did that and I didn't like that because I did that with a customer and I said that's not feasible, half legs well, it didn't work for me and why do we focus on that one thing, do you do the same thing? Yeah, I did do, mate, I've become really you're good at not looking out of size to it now, although I did get one, I did get one either look the other day and they were a one star review and it said Gareth's monotone voice killed the audio book is it also is haphazard and lame psychology which is echoed from the other reviews in here which nobody had said that and the psychology got sent to the open university and it was checked off by a professional adopter so like I don't know what you've been reading but I thought I'm going to own it so I copied and pasted it. You owned it, yes. The star is yeah on Instagram and I just put you know what, this one killed me two years ago but don't let me stop you from like stepping outside your comfort zone and going for it because if that's going to stop you, you can forget it. Yeah, I spoke at the Australian Automotive Dealers Association conference, I don't know, it must be 3,000 people there. Patrick Tessier invited me down to speak there many times and I remember I had a glowing reviews from everyone. There's one guy said, I come and page good money for this and I didn't learn anything from that and it was a one star review. I didn't sleep that night. I thought what's this all about okay and it was I even phoned the guy and I said you didn't get value of what we did. Well no it wasn't that, it was just and when you dig into it the guy had a bad day, it wasn't about me, it was he couldn't park to get to the conference center, it was all of that and I said they'd lose and sleep over one guy and who's had a bad day. That's what there's a brilliant kind of, I think it's like a seven-stage post that this mindset account hosted on Instagram and it's about a professor that worked at a school, I think it's in America Andy, he put some sums up on the first on the board and he'd made a real simple error on purpose on one of the sums. And all the kids, majority of the kids jumped on it and started laughing at him and saying he'd got that wrong and they were all kind of tearing it down and then he goes into why he did it in the lessons and basically in a nutshell what he's saying is that people will always jump on you when you've got something wrong. The law has been the first to highlight it but nobody highlighted that out of eight ones that he'd got right, he'd only got one wrong, nobody said yeah but you've got another seven or eight right, all the water to highlight were what he'd got wrong and he says that's just a massive part of the human condition that we only want to jump on and tell somebody when they've done something wrong, not when they've done it right. I wonder does it make the person who jumps on it, make them feel better, that they could identify where they've got wrong, I don't know. Possibly so, possibly so, whether it's just this inner kind of validation that we need, that we got it right and they didn't. Hey Gaff, listen I know we both believe we're a product of our environment and a good friend at Jason Graham, we both know he's brilliant. We talked about so many of the books that we've both read and that really changed my life. Can I say are there any books or maybe podcasts that you've listened to that you've read that really helped change your life, that you'd like to recommend? That's a rich dad porter, I'd changed my life. I'd never, I'd never really read a book from cover to cover, well I hadn't until I read that and I read that when was a 25 years old, believe it or not. I've not been very well at school and as a result I were like a reading, like a special reading unit. Anyway, but yeah I read Rich Dad Poor Dad whilst in Somalia and I'd read it in about two and a half weeks and it completely changed my life in terms of disawakening that kind of literature out there and you could kind of absorb that and what not and I read that and then I read The Slight Edge which really stands out and Outliers by Mark and Gladwell, I think that's probably one of the best books that I've read. I don't know that one, I don't know that outliers. Yeah it's an amazing bookmate, it's about success and where it comes from. It answers or it gives a lot of kind of credence to the nature and urge debate, so all kind of hinged to basically on time in, on age and exposure to environment but also that basically practice, dedicated practice and deliberate practice trumps innate talent and it looks at like Bill Gates and people like that and it's just absolutely fascinating. Yeah I love stuff like that. Listen I've really enjoyed this conversation. I can't wait for your next book to come through. Okay so July next year I'm going to look for that but listen, how do people get you to come and be a keynote speaker at their conference or the event? What's the best way for people to get hold of you and and also how do they get your current book? What's the easiest way to get that? Yeah so you can get older me at 0.1.co.uk, just get into it there or I'm on Instagram, Gar of Timing's author, Facebook, Gar of Timing's books. The books available, book one and book two will be available on their on Amazon, Waterstones, WHO myths, but also on Kindle and very sort of kind of means but yeah audio, audio, audio book as well it's on there so anywhere really just kind of hit me up. Listen that just leaves me to say thank you so much for this time. I really really appreciate it and I can't wait for July for the next book to come out there. It's one of the books that I've got there and I'll hurlight through and the different bits on it. Just so little gems there like focus on the failure. I'm definitely going to put that into my life so I just want to say thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it. Bye. That just leaves me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program. Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Boakett through LinkedIn. Thank you.
