Without this one thing, he would never even let his wrestlers step on the mat. On today’s episode Russell talks about a lesson he learned long ago from Dan Gable about knowing you’re going to win, and how he applies it to his life today. Here are some of the awesome things to listen for in this episode:

-- Why his daughter’s soccer team didn’t believe they could win, and how that effected the game.

-- How hoping for success is giving yourself an excuse to fail.

-- And how Russell applies one Dan Gable quote to his relationships, business, and when he competes in sports.

So listen here to see why knowing you will be successful is the key to making it happen.

Don’t step into a business unless you know you’re going to be successful. If you don’t know you’re going to be successful, it means you’ve got to step back and spend some time on yourself, on personal development and understanding yourself and your own skillset and believing in yourself enough that you can go out there and have success, otherwise it’s difficult. If I didn’t know I was going to be successful every single day walking into the Clickfunnels office, if I was scared, if I had fear and anxiety and all those things. And I’m not saying those things aren’t there. There are times I’m definitely scared or nervous or excited or all those things, but I know that when I step out on the mat that I’m going to be successful.

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Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you enjoy being here. I try to make a fun, exciting, cool podcast that I would actually want to listen to. So hopefully you guys are enjoying this.

If so, make sure to go to iTunes and subscribe, that way you make sure you get all the future episodes that are coming up. With that said, let’s jump into the theme song, and I got something really fun to talk to you about today.

Alright, so my lesson for you guys today stems off of going and watching my daughter play soccer this weekend. My daughter, Ellie, she is into soccer and she loves it, and up to this point she’s always been on the, I don’t know what they call it, not the league teams, but like the local Boise league.

So it’s like, not a super hard league. So for the last couple of years, the team played together and got better and better to the point now they just thrash everybody. So this year they decided, “Hey, we should go up and go to a bigger division.” So Clickfunnels sponsored them, well I say Clickfunnels, it was really me. I don’t feel good taking money out of Clickfunnels to sponsor, but we sponsored them.

And now they got these cool jerseys that have a Clickfunnels logo on the back, which is kind of cool. And they’re playing in this new league and they had their very first game this Saturday. And they’ve been working really, really hard, they got a really good coach, they got good people around them, they’re practicing hard and the girls are doing just awesome. And they’re trying to figure out, this next level, where am I at? Am I going to be good? Am I going to be bad? What’s going to happen?

There’s all that fear of the new thing, right. And before we left, I remember Ellie saying, “Well this team’s way better than us, we’re going to get killed.” And she was telling me that as we were driving to go to the soccer game. I’m like, “You can’t say that. You can’t go into a game thinking you’re going to lose, or you’re going to lose. That’s just how it works. You can’t do that.” And I remember watching as they got out on Saturday and started playing, they did really good at first. It was a tied game for a long, long time.

Then the other team scored once and then it was like, boom, boom, boom, scored a bunch of times in a row. They fought well, but they ended up losing in the end. But as I was watching them, it reminded me of this video I used to watch, this movie back in my wrestling days. It was a VHS tape that I bought that was talking about arguably one of the greatest wrestlers, and definitely the greatest wrestling coach that’s come out of America, and his name’s Dan Gable. Dan Gable, if you look, he’s like, I talked about him before on this podcast, he’s like the Michael Jordan of wrestling.

His name’s synonymous with wrestling. When you hear, “Who’s the greatest wrestler of all time?” people say Dan Gable. So Dan’s amazing and as good of a wrestler as he was, he then went on and started coaching the Iowa, Hawkeyes and they won like, I don’t know, 20 championships in a row afterwards. And he’s one of the most winning-est coaches of all time, of any sport.

As good as an athlete as he was, he was an even better coach. So this video we used to watch, it was him coaching his athletes and told Gable’s story and talked about his only lost he ever had. He only lost once in high school, excuse me, he lost once in college, his very senior year, his last match he lost, and he got so upset that he started training for the Olympics, and he worked out 7 hours a day and went to the Olympics. And the Russians specifically said, “We’re going to train an athlete just to beat Dan Gable.”

And he went to the Olympics, and not only did they not beat him, but nobody even scored a point on him in the Olympics. And that’s why Dan’s like this legend in our sport. And so he tells that story in the beginning of the movie, so you get all excited. And then it shows him switching to coaching and then what he’d do with his athletes. And I still remember this quote, like Tom and Terry Branch are these twins, who Tom is now the head coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes now that Gable is retired.

But I remember him saying in the video, “We used to do stuff that’d make a billy goat puke. That’s how tough Gable’s practices were.” And they showed the practices and talked about everything. They talked about the mindset and the mentality and all the things that you have to have. But there’s this one quote that I remember I didn’t get when I was a teenager. I used to watch this all the time and Gable said, “I would never let an athlete step on the mat unless he knew he was going to win.” And I remember thinking that, “Well, what if he loses?” And I didn’t get it at the time.

But I used to watch that, literally once a week, we’d watch that. Sometimes multiple times a week, because it’d get us all motivated and pumped up for wrestling and for our tournaments. So we’d always watch it ahead of time, me and my wrestling buddies. And every single time that line would come up, it would stick in my head, and I didn’t quite get it. He’d say, “I would never let an athlete step on the mat for me, unless he knew he was going to win.”

And as I got through my later years of high school and started competing at a college level, I started understanding that. It was interesting because I, and I’m sure if anyone’s done sports before you probably had this before. But for example, one of my best friends, one of my favorite people, we would wrestle together at wrestling practice, and I had some weird mental thing where I just, in my head subconsciously I thought he was better than me.

So every time he’d wrestle, he’d beat me. And not like a close match. He’d beat me like I was a little girl who’d never wrestled before. It was bad. And then me and him would go to a tournament together and we’re in the same weight class, and I would win the tournament and he’d take like 5th. Or we’d go to this tournament and he would lose to somebody by 5 points, and I’d wrestle that same person and I would tech fall him, which means I’d win by more than 15 points, so they stop the match early.

And it was just like, for some reason, every time I’d step on the mat with this one guy, my friend, in my head I didn’t think I was going to win, so I’d lose. And it was so frustrating, and so, it just drove me crazy. I don’t get it. I beat all the people you lose to, but I can’t beat you. What’s going on? And that’s when I started hearing this message in my head from back when I was watching this Gable video. “I’ve never let a wrestler step on the mat unless he knew he was going to win, before he stepped out onto the mat.”

And I started thinking about that with my daughter. She stepped out on the field and she did not know she was going to win, in fact, she thought you know, we’re probably going to lose. So they went out there and they lost. And I thought of that, how many times in life that message applies. And obviously for the context of this podcast, it has to do with your business. How many times do we get into business where we’re like, “I hope I’m going to succeed. I hope this is going to work. I hope, I hope, I hope.” That’s the equivalent of me stepping out on the mat and saying, “I hope I can beat this guy.”

Which means I don’t know if I’m going to win or not, but I hope I can. Right, that’s the mentality that you’re stepping on the mat. And if you do that most of the time, at least the majority of the time you’re going to lose, because you’re hoping you’re going to win. Dan Gable said this, “I don’t let any athlete step out on the mat unless they know they’re going to win.” They may not win, but they must step on the mat knowing they’re going to win. When I step into a business I don’t say, “I hope I’m going to be successful.”

I step in knowing I’m going to be successful, knowing I’m going to win. Knowing that no matter what happens, no matter what the trials, the problems, the ups, the downs, the sleepless nights, things like, I’m know I’m going to win. Because if you go into it hoping you’re going to win, when those things pop up, the trials, you’ll be like “I knew I was going, I hoped I was going to be successful, but I kind of knew it wasn’t, in the back of my mind I knew it wasn’t going to be successful.” You let yourself off the hook if you’re hoping it’s going to be successful.

You can’t go into something having hope, and thinking I hope I’m going to win. Especially going in thinking, I may lose. You’ve got to go in believing a hundred million percent that, “I’m going to be successful, I’m going to win. I’m stepping on this mat and I’m going to beat that person. I know I can beat them.” Otherwise Dan Gable wouldn’t even let you get on the mat. He would look at you and be like, ‘Nope. You have doubt in your mind, I can see it.

Therefore I’m not going to let you compete for me. I’d rather lose this match, have a forfeit than let you step on the mat not knowing that you’re going to win.” And that’s the kind of mindset that he demanded out of his athletes, and that’s why they won the 20-whatever NCAA championships in a row. Because he’d never let an athlete step on the mat unless they knew they were going to win. So for you, as your coach in this marketing sphere, in this business realm, I want to make sure that you guys go in with the same thing.

Don’t step into a business unless you know you’re going to be successful. If you don’t know you’re going to be successful, it means you’ve got to step back and spend some time on yourself, on personal development and understanding yourself and your own skillset and believing in yourself enough that you can go out there and have success, otherwise it’s difficult. If I didn’t know I was going to be successful every single day walking into the Clickfunnels office, if I was scared, if I had fear and anxiety and all those things. And I’m not saying those things aren’t there.

There are times I’m definitely scared or nervous or excited or all those things, but I know that when I step out on the mat that I’m going to be successful. At 10x Growth Con, when I stepped on the mat, I knew I was going to be successful. And if you watched the first one, I did, I made 3.2 million in 90 minutes. The second one I failed. I fell flat on my face, but regardless, when I stepped on that stage I knew I was going to be successful. Same thing at Funnel Hacking Live, same thing when I speak at other places, same thing when I’m selling on a webinar, I don’t go into hoping it’s going to be successful, I go in knowing it’s going to be successful. And that’s the mindset you’ve got to have.

So if you don’t have that mindset yet, it might be the thing that’s holding you back. You’re hoping you’re going to be successful, and because you’re hoping you’re willing and able to let yourself off the hook, and that’s why you’re not hitting the goals and the things you want. So that is my message for you guys today. For you to go out there and again, use this for business but use this as a metaphor for all aspects of your life. There’s the girl you want to ask out on a date, there’s the business venture, the partnership you want to do, there’s the relationship….whatever that thing is, you’ve got to step into that having absolute confidence, absolute certainty, knowing that when you step out on the mat you’re going to win.

And if you do that your likelihood of winning will go up. It’s the weirdest thing. You know, me losing to my buddy over and over and over again because I had this seed of doubt in my mind that man, he always beats me, let alone the fact that I beat all the people he loses to, but because I had this belief that he was going to beat me, he beat me.

And it was just that, it was a belief and it’s something you can shift, that you can change. And I wish I would have understood that at a deeper level back then, but I understand it now, and I want you guys to understand it now. Because it will make your jobs, your business, your growth, your relationships, whatever you’re looking for, so much better when you go into it with absolute certainty, knowing you’re going to win. That’s my message for today.

And with that said, I’m going to leave you guys. Think about that, and if you’ve enjoyed this please, please, please go to iTunes, subscribe to the podcast number one, number two leave a comment, and if you really liked it please take a screen shot of this and post it on Facebook or Instagram and tag me. Do @RussellBrunson and that will tag me on Instagram. If you do @RussellBrunsonLive they’ll tag me on Facebook. And use #marketingsecrets. I’d love to hear what you guys are thinking about this and other episodes. And with that said, appreciate you all, thanks so much for everything and I’ll talk to you guys soon.