One of the ways people who are new to a certain field or industry can do to become successful is to take advice from those who have been around the block and know the ropes. But where do you draw the line between taking advice and listening to the voice inside of you? Merrill Chandler teaches you how to determine when taking advice, whether about fundability™ or not, from someone else is the best path for you. It’s all a matter of learning to play things by ear and adjusting your approach when needed. Don’t miss out on this great learning opportunity provided by Merrill.

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Can You Really Trust Your Gut?

Internal Versus External Authority

In this episode, I’m taking on some cool things. I’m going to challenge you to take a deeper look at what’s going on. We’re going to be talking about internal versus external authority, taking and receiving advice, that blind spot that we talked about before.

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I’ve got something to say about this particular topic specifically. We’re going to be talking about internal versus external authority. What do I mean by that? I’ve been preaching for decades both professionally and personally, with my children, teammates, partnerships, and my love interests, and in every way, there are two frameworks that we operate from. Sometimes we get confused. Sometimes we completely missed the boat on what’s happening to us or for us, and how we can create a better effective way of dealing with our lives especially in times of stress. Let’s define our terms. Internal authority is where you can generate a self-possessed and well-considered thorough evaluation of what’s going on in your life or when you’re up against a particular issue. Let’s take a doctor. We’re going to use the doctor’s example throughout this entire process. Internal authority comes when there is self-possession, self-confidence, clarity, and gobs of experience. External authority is what a doctor would do when he or she goes to a medical school. You don’t just go into a brain surgery environment. You don’t walk into the operating room and say, “I know how to do brain surgery. I have a gut feeling that this is what needs to be done.”

That’s an interesting way to come across that, “I know it needs to be done because I have a feeling that this is the right move.” I’m not going to say that it’s not true. I’m going to say that the likelihood or probability of success in that operating room is tightly linked to your skillset. Our gut feelings or intuition and our ability to connect the dots are specifically linked to having all the data first. We go to medical school and we rely 100% upon known operating procedures and anatomy evaluations. We work with cadavers so we can gain experience with the human body, but it’s all external to us. We don’t know jack about brain surgery. What we do know is little by little, we collect experience, more information, and knowledge.

Our intuition then comes in and says, “What about this?” We start connecting dots more effectively the more we know. What is suspicious to all of us and what we don’t trust in the world is when somebody comes in and they don’t know what they’re talking about. They create a line of thinking, a set of recommendations, or specific tasks or strategies that don’t do anything for us. They don’t help us at all. A perfect example of this is in previous episodes we’ve talked about the mythological way of getting business credit. If you do it the way that’s out there, before you learned about the Get Fundable way, you found out that you’re trying to build a Paydex score. That score requires eighteen months of building credit accounts. Those credit accounts are Uline accounts and FedEx accounts and all these different types of little accounts.

Fundability™ Advice: Internal authority is where you generate a well-considered evaluation of what’s going on in your life when you’re up against a particular issue.

In the end, you find out, “I can have a 100 Paydex score, and still Bank of America is not going to give me a $50,000 business line of credit.” We can believe and implement the faults of external authorities. We’ve got to be careful where we’re studying, what we’re looking at, and who we’re listening to. I believe you and every person you know needs to be as critical and cynical as possible about what you listen to. External authority can be and has been highly deceptive when we don’t have enough information. Think of it this way. People said, “Aren’t you afraid when somebody is trying to take apart your strategies or questioning your fundability™ way against all these other methodologies?” I simply looked at him and said, “I love cynics and critics. If they’re honest with themselves, when they see something that works that is viable and transforms everything that they’re trying to accomplish and gets them the results they’re looking for, they become my greatest fans.”

I welcome cynicism. In every possible way, I welcome their critique. I don’t know if it’s going to be the 5th or 25th thing that they learn about. Every one of us, if you’ve been bingeing the show, you went, “This is a thing.” Either this works because you implemented things or you’re like, “This makes too much sense.” This has to be worth following up on and doing more with. You then check out my book, the bootcamp, the mastermind or you get involved because you begin to believe it. The more you do and the better the results you get, the more phenomenal you get. You become a superhero at fundability™ and I get to be your cape. My team and I get to support you looking good while you implement all the tasks. When it comes to fundability™, I may be your external authority. You’ve had lots of them when it comes to business credit perhaps. Even the subtle things that we look at it in the book, podcast, or bootcamp, you may be having greater comfort and confidence in your ability to connect the dots that I, your coaching team, or your advisors provided you.

Every once in a while, we run into clients, students, and people who stand up and say, “I love everything you told me, but this thing, I’m going to do it this way.” That’s okay. Especially if somebody says, “My gut tells me that this is the right way. I’ve got to do it this way.” I’m going to outline my case and I’m going to tell you what I believe works based on the hundreds or thousands of cases that have worked, but I’m never going to tell you, “Don’t follow your gut.” I’m going to say, “Can I back up a little bit when the landmine explodes or the collision at 60 miles an hour on a rocket sled into a brick wall?” I want to back up a little bit where I can help pick up the pieces. Every one of us has somebody. I don’t like the judgment word. They’re not pigheaded, stubborn, or willful. Those don’t serve me or any of us. I don’t believe those words.

What I believe is that some people are enthusiastic and committed to running that sometimes they didn’t have the football. One of my dear friends from ages ago, he was his awesome man. He may have met others since he told me this when we were kids, but he goes, “Merrill, you’re the only guy I know who can run down the football field and have everybody follow you and not have the football.” That stuck with me because that meant that I had influence. There are people who were willing to believe me. I’ve spent a lifetime dotting every I, crossing every T, making sure in every way that I did not say a word to a soul unless I had five times more evidence than I needed.

You didn’t hear about FICO after we went because I wanted to make sure that everything that I was learning verified and validated what we were doing. We made certain subtle shifts because the scientists and the FICO teams gave us great feedback that we were like, “This is good, but you could tighten it up over here.” I’m like, “I’m all in.” One of my life goals was always to have the football if I was going to run down the field. The question is for you, “Do you have the football when you’re running down the field?” I’m not alone in this. My enthusiasm and bull in the china shop are certainly capable in every way of knocking over dishes when I’m running through there.

How do you overwhelm your external authority for what you believe to be right? You don’t have all the case studies. You don’t have everything and all the information you should have before you start doing or implementing things. How much education? The balancing act to that, the internal authority versus external is, “How many of us and you spend so much time gathering, external authority, training, but then you don’t execute anything or very little?” There are the seminar hoppers where we learn more and we tell ourselves that learning more means I’m doing something. In fact, we’re not doing something. We’re only learning more.

You don’t need more education, especially those of you who’ve done bootcamps. You need to take bootcamps and training. You’ve chosen a wealth strategy and paid tens of thousands of dollars for the training. We’ve got to do something about it. We’ve got to exercise our internal authority and start taking what we learned and implementing it. There are times where we run into clients, students, and readers of my book who were like, “Thank you so much. I’m going to do a blank.” I’m like, “How did you get that out of the conversation? I don’t understand how you got that out of that chapter of the book or that part of the bootcamp or even our coaching clients.”

When we say, “You need to do X, Y, and Z.” They’re like, “A, B, and C are awesome.” We’re like, “X, Y, and Z are appropriate in this strategy.” They’re like, “I’m going to do A.” It’s unfathomable to me, but it happens. There are times in which as bootcampers, no one’s ever sent me the book back, but we’ve said, “Bless your heart, Godspeed, and God bless.” I’ve tried to weigh-in as often as possible. I can’t be a part of this train wreck that is coming at you. Because you’re not doing what I am recommending based on hundreds or thousands of cases that I know work and succeeded brilliantly, I can’t take you on as a student or a client because it’s going to be nuclear.

This is not going to be a little kapow. What you’re doing is going to screw up your situation in crazy hard ways. My team and I were talking about this. We had our daily team meetings. We had an example come up and this was a while back. They said, “What do we do?” Part of the question was, “Why is this a thing? It’s clear. Step-by-step, dot this I, cross this T. Pull this plug and funding or hire fundability™ or, “Look at that, $20,000 business credit card to offload your personal credit card balances.” As a group, what we came to was that during times of stress, some of us overwhelmed the facts with what we want to be true. If I do this and then all of the good external authority, all the good teachings, all the great proof that’s out there, we listened to it, filtered, and shapeshifted it just enough so we can say we’re doing that thing in our mind but bulldozing ahead.

Right Or Happy?

I’ve said this in my bootcamps and a couple of episodes, we can be right or we can be happy. We get to be both rarely. Anyone of us, you and me, any time we are committed to a course or a path that goes against all of our coachings, all of our advisors, all of the external authorities that tell us, “This is a nuclear path.” How do we not do that? That goes back to our blind spots. We’re completely blind to the 180 degrees behind us. I wanted to use this opportunity. I want to yell on the rooftops, “Learn what you need to do. No more, no less.” Go inside, find out how it serves you now to do something about it and then implement it.

One of the things we were talking about, we shot this amazing masterclass on Surviving the Crisis on how do we do recession management, survive, thrive, and recover if the worst situation occurs. One of the things that came out of that was if we’re on a slippery slope, how do we dig in? Most of us tend to throw the baby out of the bathwater like, “It’s no use.” We took care of that idea. That’s the horrible worst idea ever. At the same time, when we’re looking at a recession square in the face, it could be a personal financial struggle or it could be the nationwide global that we seem to be facing.

The question is, “What is it that you want? Who do you depend on? Part of the throwing the baby out of the bathwater is not throwing away the voice of reason that the people who know the strategies, who’ve done this a dozen times, and know how to coach you. I am blessed. I’m stunned that there’s no contraction with our clients. Everybody gets that this is the time. If they didn’t work on the fundability™ when they should have, everybody’s leaning in because they know that great opportunities are facing us shortly, the next 12 to 24 months. Do you know how hydroplaning works?

They have been crossing from the UK to France. They have these huge boats that go so fast that they start hydroplaning. They’re up on planes and they go faster for less energy because they don’t have as much surface area. They only cruise across the channel. Race boats use hydroplaning to get less drag. The first instance when you hit the gas is it goes down. It was like the wrist rocket idea that I’ve shared where the slingshot effect apparently pulls back. In hydroplaning, to use that metaphor, it feels like there’s a subtle drag. It then launches and shoots you forward. That’s what our recession is.

Many times, we look at what we’re facing. If we get nervous, uncertain, scared, or if we make some wrong decisions, all of a sudden, we want to contract personally. When we get scared, we start throwing away the advisers that are here to help us get through this because they’ve done it before. I’m thrilled that as a tribe, Get Fundable and Credit Sense are an art. More clients are getting more results and are spending more time getting fundable because they see that great opportunities are on the horizon. My podcast universe, Funding Hackers and tribesters, how do we learn what we need to know?

It is unlikely that you will ever know everything that I know about fundability™, but you don’t need to take down $1 million in business lines of credit. That’s the point I’m making. You don’t need to know what I know. I need to know what I know because I serve 1,000-plus clients. Everybody who has differences in what they need to hit that $200,000, $500,000, or $1 million. I love this stuff. I’m dedicated to learning it and giving it to you when you need it to solve a problem. You don’t need to know everything. You need to know enough to make a decision about how to implement it. That’s why it’s always been fun.

Fundability™ Advice: If we don’t have enough internal authority, we blindly follow anybody out there. If we have too much internal authority, then we’re a bull in the china shop.

The book is The Principles of Fundability™. It has seventeen chapters on how the game is played. There are no strategies in there. When you go to the bootcamp, it’s all about strategy, but the strategies are the ones that work for everybody. Coaching and the mastermind that’s included with it, that’s where we are solving every tiny problem that we need that stands in our way. Not only getting $100,000 or $200,000, but how to get $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, $700,000, and $1 million.

If we don’t have enough internal authority, we blindly follow anybody out there. If we have too much internal authority, then we’re a bull in the china shop. We all know which one I’ve faulted too since I was a young man. That’s the range in internal authority. “I follow anybody I got and I believe everything I hear. It’s on the internet, so it must be true.” There’s the bull in the china shop. “No matter what anybody else says, I’m going to do it my way.” The dynamics of external authority is to keep going, study, and learn data. That’s one extreme. The other extreme is, “I don’t learn anything. I don’t want to know a thing. I’m going to follow my instincts.” Notice the two patterns.

I’m going to quote Aristotle because that makes me cool. Aristotle said, “Good is the mean between the extremes.” We don’t want to be on either extreme, the bull or the sycophant, the one who listens to everybody and has no opinion for themselves. We don’t want to be either one of those. Good is square in the middle of that. Learn everything and do nothing. There’s a perfect middle there as well. As we look at this, back to the surgery. How many of you are trying to do brain surgery without enough information? How many of you keep studying WebMD, but not going to a medical school? That’s the dilemma that we all face. I highly suggest if you’re in the fundability™ game if you love this stuff as much as I do or even close, then come to fundability™ school. It is awesome.

Go to GetFundableBook.com. If you haven’t ordered it, get it. If you haven’t been to the bootcamp, it’s $97, GetFundableBootcamp.com. Come and join and find out the strategy level of what you read in the book. If the strategies are not enough. If you want more than some awesome, insanely cool things to blow away $97. If you want more for your life. If you want to be at the top of your game, let’s do this, be a resident. That is what we’re talking about. I’d love to have you come and join me. Every day, I do want to come and talk to you. Every day, I do an episode. It fills my heart with wonder because more people are sharing more episodes and the word is getting out. I want to thank you for doing whatever you’ve done to refer someone to come here and find them their truth about how to maximize their dreams in their life and the funding to back it up. If nothing else, call me Dr. Fundable and you can be a resident. Let’s make sure that we get off of WebMD. It is not serving you. Let’s learn what we need to know and then put it to work. You guys have a spectacular morning, afternoon, or evening.

Important Links:

• Funding Hackers – Facebook group
• GetFundableBook.com
• GetFundableBootcamp.com

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