Have you ever wondered how you can achieve better results with your money, business, health, etc.? That’s what “Chief Results Officer” Blaine Oelkers teaches his clients to achieve more in less time. Here’s the thing: the difference between understanding and getting results has a massive gap if you wish to achieve better results quickly. But how can we close those gaps and illuminate the path to success? Tune in to find out what hacks you can apply in your life today.
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Achieve Better Results FASTER With Blaine Oelkers
I’m so proud to be a Rippler with you. I appreciate that you have been tuning in. You have been binging and sharing our episodes. Even more importantly, you’ve been implementing the things that you’ve been learning, hopefully, in a good way, not in a way that’s destructive. I would imagine that if you’re implementing things from this show, it’s a good thing for sure.
As a reminder, be sure to go check out our YouTube channel and subscribe. It is the Blaine Oelkers page. If you haven’t done so, go there and subscribe. Not only do you get these episodes, but we have several other videos, including video shorts, little tidbits of information, and things that you can follow along with and consume like crazy. Go check that out.
My special guest is someone I’ve been friends with for several years. Over the years, what I’ve seen is that he’s the guy that gets things done. Many of you get all this information. You probably tune in to tons of shows, if not just this one. The problem is that when you tune into these things, often, the difference between understanding and getting the results could be a big gap, especially if you don’t know how to implement those things.
That’s the thing with my guest here, Blaine Oelkers. He is America’s Chief Results Officer. This guy is all about getting action, getting it done, and getting results, which I am a huge fan of. We always are talking about how to get results. That’s why I want to bring him on in this episode. How do you get better results in your life? It doesn’t have to be financially. It could be in any aspect or area of your life to be able to get those results where you start to live that life of your dreams today.
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Blaine, welcome to our show.
Thank you for having me on. I am so happy to be here. We’ve known each other for a number of years. We met through a mastermind group. I want to say thank you for having me on, but also thank you for having the heart of the servant. You’re out there helping people. I know you retired more than once. You don’t have to do what you do, but you decide to do it because you feel like you’re here on the planet to help other people and to create those results ripples for other people. I like that it’s in multiple areas of your life.
You were in some 30-day challenge groups with me. I see you, especially on the physical side. I’m in awe of the speed at which you can run the mile and run that many miles in a row at that speed. You’re excellent. You lead by example. I appreciate that. I am happy to be here today. Hopefully, we can impart results ripple onto some of the audience today so that they, too, can get a little bit more done.
There’s this gap here. Information is not transformation. I almost feel like we don’t need much more information as we do the implementation. It is of you getting yourself to do the things that you know will produce valuable doneness for you, or whatever that is. It is very personalized. I call that personal implementation. That’s what I’ve been studying for a long period of time, honing and refining. Most of the stuff we’ll talk about today is self-evident. If you give it a little try, you’re going to find that it works and it will work for you almost immediately.
That is a good point with what you bring up about implementation. I remember there was a Shaolin master that said, “I fear the man that’s practiced a punch 10,000 times versus the one that’s practiced 10,000 moves one time.” It’s not about getting a wide spread of information but how you implement and master what you’ve learned. I want to know. How did you even become the Chief Results Officer? What was the inspiration behind that?
Maybe many of the audience could relate to this. I’ve always been a little bit of a seeker looking for knowledge and trying to figure 3out how to better myself. I’ve always also, like you, had this heart of a servant. I always wanted to serve. Back in college, in the ‘80s, I went to Purdue. I graduated from Purdue University. I met my wife there. We’ve been married for 30 years. Back in college, I saw this little ad for an audio tape about a book called Think and Grow Rich, which I had not heard of. It was Earl Nightingale who went on to become a mentor of mine. He was reading an abridged version of Think and Grow Rich.
In that book, it talks about how to think and grow rich. The rich can be money. He talks about money, but it could be anything you want. It could be harmony, better relationships, or a better physical body. It is anything that you desire. Later, I called it a white table. What you think about, you bring about. That was the genesis of my taking control of my life and realizing that it’s not what happens that determines my future. It’s what you do about what happens. That was a moment of dawning comprehension for me.
Later on, that book went on to influence me even more. I was able to create businesses that didn’t have any daily operations. I was working a corporate job and my son was one-year-old. I came back from a business trip and he gave me the cold shoulder. I’m like, “What’s going on here?” She says, “You were gone so long that he forgot who you were.” I was like, “What?” That hit me hard.
I made this clarifying decision that I would be a work-from-home dad. I was going to put my total focus on that and not even look at anything that wouldn’t be something I could work from home. That was the start of my results journey. I was figuring that stuff out. It took me a year. That was many years ago that I became that work-at-home dad. The kids are gone. I have two kids. They’re out of the nest. What that did is that it gave me a lot of time. Once I got free of the job, it gave me a lot of time. That had a big ripple effect on my whole life. It gave me more time to study people.
Jim Rohn was a famous guy that became a big mentor to me. I started learning as much as I could about that and helping other people. People who had mastermind groups, like the one that we met in, came to me and said, “Would you come and help members get results?” For the last decade, I’ve been helping business owners get results personally. It’s personal implementation. It’s about you getting stuff done that is the most valuable thing for you.
I went on, trademarked the phrase, and started developing tools, systems, and master classes. A lot of it is experiential. They had super results in days. I created all that stuff. I do it and I love it. It passes the Powerball test. Some people say, “What’s the Powerball test?” The Powerball test is if you won the Powerball, which is this big lottery, of $500 million, you’re excited, but you have to pay taxes on it.
Let’s say you spend a year celebrating, taking care of the kids, setting up the trust funds, buying everybody whatever, and buying your chief results officer a new car of his choice. You do that for a year. A year goes by and you’ve done all that. You’ve done all the partying and all that stuff. There’s nothing else for you to do. You wake up a year later and you still have $200 million in the bank. What would you do with your life then? You have unlimited resources.
It’s interesting that in a workshop setting, 90% of the people will say, “I would help people blank.” The blank’s different for everybody, but it would be about helping other people. The Powerball test is would you still do what you do? For me, I would still be doing this show. I would still help people take control of their lives by taking control of themselves even if I won the Powerball.
I’m doing something that we call Pass the Powerball test. There have been points in my life when what I was doing didn’t pass the Powerball test. I knew I had to change. I had to do something to move and pivot in a direction back toward that thing. For you, someone who’s retired twice, I assume that beyond the money, you enjoy helping people at some level.
That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing here. I’ve had to ask myself the same question. I’m like, “If money were no issue in my life, what would I spend my time doing?” It was a hard question to ask in the beginning. It was tough for me to come up with an answer. I remember the first answer I came up with was almost more of a social norm-type answer. It was more of, “I’d travel more.”
I remember the friend that asked me that question said, “Really? Are you going to travel 52 weeks out of the year? Realistically, what are you going to do with the other 40 weeks out of the year?” I was stumped. I was like, “Maybe I’ll teach ballroom dancing or something like that.” Teaching was always the thing that kept coming up. That’s why I’m here doing what I’m doing. It is not ballroom dancing. We’re teaching about money. It’s true. It’s such a powerful question to ask.
That’s why I say a year to get all that other stuff that you want to do. You maybe want to travel. You maybe want to sit on the beach. You do all that stuff. Take a year to do that, but then, you’re going to come back around to a little bit more towards your purpose, what is divinely given to you or what gifts were given to you, it feels so good when you’re using them. You forget about how long you spend on it because you get into that flow of doing it. That’s a little bit of a longer story than maybe you wanted, but that’s how I ended up here as the Chief Results Officer.
You always hear the thing that it takes 21 days to even break a habit and then another month or so to try to create a new one. You’re saying that instead of taking 21 days, you can do it in 21 seconds. How is that possible?
I have a company called Selfluence. It is the art and science of influencing yourself. I often say that we’re powered by selfluence. It means that you already know how to do these things. Let’s talk about creating habits. You are already a habit master. It may be you realizing that and tapping into that. They say it takes 21 days to create a new habit. That’s false. I’m sorry. Somebody lied to you. Let me ask you this question. If you could create a new habit in 21 seconds, do you have a new habit in mind, whether it is a physical habit or a work habit? What habit are you looking to create?
For me, a good habit would be to avoid snacking at night, especially after 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM. I want to be able to say, “Let’s break that chain.”
That is something different, which we could also get into. Bad habit elimination is another topic. We can get into that. I figured out something that I call the 21-second habit. The way I stumbled upon it was that my wife was having nearly daily migraine headaches. The doctor said, “Here’s this journal thing. You got to fill this out. When you get the migraine, what did you eat? What was the weather like?”
There were all these different things that she had to track. She’d do it for a few days and then she’d lose the log book or she couldn’t find the log book. She’d have a migraine and I’d ask her, “Where’s the log book?” That’s not the right thing to do. I realized quickly that she needed to fill this out every day. We realized that she was a habit master at brushing her teeth. We took the headache log and a pen and put the toothbrush and toothpaste on top of it. She was a twice-a-day-er. She was brushing for two minutes, as the dentist said, and would fill out the log. She went from not doing it for 3 or 4 days to 90 days in a row.
The key here is what I call habit linking. Habit linking is where you link the new habit to an existing habit. I had two new habits that I wanted to start. One was a Bible app that I wanted to make sure I read every day. The other one was that I wanted to take a mind shower every day. People wash the physical body, but I wanted to wash my mind. I use an app. There are a couple of different apps that I use, but Headspace is an example. It’s a meditation and breathing app. You can use that time to wash away the head trash from the day before. I do it every morning. Those were two new habits that I wanted to start.
What I realized is that in the morning, I was a habit master at this device. There wasn’t a morning that has gone by that I didn’t look at that phone. I was already a habit master at checking my phone. What I did was I took all the apps off the front page except for those two apps. I put them there and said, “When I open the phone, I have to do those two apps before I can do anything else on that phone.”
An advanced part of the technique of the 21-second habit is if you can surf an urge to want to do something else. In my wife’s case, she can’t go to bed with that gritty feeling in her teeth. She was surfing that. For me, I wanted to check, like, “Did any orders come in? Did my kids text me? What’s going on in the world?” There are all these things I want to know, but I can’t do that until I do those two apps.
The nice thing about those apps is that they track how many days in a row you do. As of today, I’m at 1,477 days in a row without missing that habit. You want to talk about consistency. When you link the habit like that and then start to have this unbreakable chain of success, your self-confidence goes up. Physically and chemically, in your brain, you feel good every time you do that habit. The streak gets longer and bigger. The idea is to link it to something you are already doing.
When you link the habit to an existing habit and then start to have this unbreakable chain of success, your self-confidence goes up. Physically and chemically in your brain, you feel good every time you do that habit. The streak gets longer and bigger. Click To TweetI’m into next-day planning. You need to plan your day. If you’re not playing your day, it’s like getting on an airplane and there’s no pilot. You look over there and you look in. You say to the flight attendant, “There’s no pilot.” They’re like, “We don’t have a pilot.” How long are you going to sit on that plane? You’re not. That’s what you’re doing every day when you wake up without a plan.
There is this lady. She’s an attorney. She said, “I want to start this new habit of planning my day.” I said, “Start simple with a piece of paper and a pen. Jot down a few things you want to get done that day. What is something that you do without fail every single morning?” She says, “I have a cup of coffee.” I said, “Do you ever miss a day?” She said, “No. If I miss a day, I’m a bad person.”
I said, “Here is the deal. You have to do the list before you can have that first sip of coffee or you agree to drink the coffee while you’re making the list. Either way, it’s tied to something you already have mastered. That’s number one. Number two, surf some kind of urge.” It could be the desire for a cup of coffee, the desire for me to check my phone, or my wife’s desire to brush her teeth. If you can surf an urge, then it’s super powerful.
People are able to create a new habit linking it to the existing habit and then surfing an urge. A tip here is to start simple. Start with just one habit and get used to it. Try to make the resistance as low as possible. If it’s a big habit, like exercise, then maybe you got to close out the night before. Try to make it as small as possible.
Be sure to win early and win often. An example is an exercise. Someone says, “I want to start exercising 30 minutes a day.” I say, “That’s good. Let’s put that in there, but let’s have it linked to something that’s going to make sure you win. How about three minutes of exercise before you get in the shower? You’ve got that time. If you don’t have that time, then give me five pushups and call that your workout.”
Psychologically, you want to win. You build up bigger things. You know a lot about these 30-day challenges. You are very self-disciplined. Except for snacking at night, you have pretty good willpower. This linking doesn’t take any willpower. It’s nice that you can create these new habits. You don’t need any willpower. You just link it to that existing habit.
This is awesome stuff. I look forward to that 30-day challenge each morning. Sometimes, you get to the end of the challenges. When they get challenging and you get to the end of the month, you’re thinking, “We got 80 bicep curls coming up today. That’s going to be tough,” but I love them. I look forward to it. I’ve created a habit.
Every morning I wake up, one of the first things I do is check the challenge. I’m like, “What am I doing today? What’s happening?” It’s a habit. I do it every day, and you’ve seen that. This is awesome stuff. I appreciate it. Let’s learn how to do this. This is essential for not just consistent habits but consistent results, too. What’s the best way for them to follow you?
About five years ago, I did a TEDx Talk. I talk about the concept of a white table. What you think about, you bring about. I share an elegant, simple way to program your mind with your top goal, maybe 60 to 100 times a day. It’s cool. The easiest thing is to go to BlaineTEDx.com. There, you can opt in. You can get a copy of my TEDx talk. You get a transcript of it. Also, we’ll be connected. You’ll get some emails about me.
You can connect with me directly and then get access to articles. You could ask me. I have a whole guide. I have a guidebook about creating new habits, which outlines this technique and gives you all the things. There are things you do more than once a day that you can link to. There are things you only do once a day, like get up or get dressed. There are things that you do weekly, monthly, and yearly. There’s a large list to help you connect those habits as well as a whole bunch of other results stuff. That’s why I’m here on the planet.
I hope I can create results ripple in your life. That’s what turns me on these days. It is to help people to have that moment of dawning comprehension, like, “I could do this. I can start that new habit. I could drink more water,” or whatever the case may be. Maybe some other time, I can come back and we could talk more about time management or bad habit elimination. There are some cool things around that as well.
If you’re willing to take action, go to BlaineTEDx.com right now. Go check that out and get signed up for all those free resources. That’s fantastic and very generous of you. I appreciate that.
I appreciate being on the show. I want to say thank you to you. I hope your audience knows how special they get to have you on this show. This is work to put this stuff together, to put these ideas together, to put these shows together, and then to put it together in this format where it’s going to live online forever. I want you to know that you are most likely touching lives that are not yet born. There’s somebody that’s not even born yet that has the opportunity to read this 50 years from now and get some guidance. A lot of the stuff that you have is timeless. You’re going to be creating ripples for a long time. Thank you for doing what you do. It’s an honor to be here today.
A lot of the stuff you have is timeless, and you're going to be creating ripples for a long time. Click To TweetI appreciate it. This is the thing. This is what we want. It is the implementation of real results so that you can create a bigger ripple effect on the lives of others. I am appreciative of Blaine to do that. There are episodes of this show. We appreciate you tuning in. As always, make sure you go and make it a prosperous week. We’ll see you soon.
Important Links
- Money Ripples – YouTube
- Blaine Oelkers – LinkedIn
- Think and Grow Rich
- Headspace
- BlaineTEDx.com
About Blaine Oelkers
– Leading authority in personal implementation and consistency
– Habit Master with documented streak of 1434 days in a row and counting!
– LinkedIn Top Connector! 25,000+ 1st-level connections, 1.7M 2nd-level and 786M 3rd-level
– Lifetime work-from-home entrepreneur
– Graduate of Purdue University & Stanford University’s Social Entrepreneurship Program
– Co-author of 3 books & frequent podcast guest
– Oversees more than 20,000 weekly personal implementation plan check-ins per year