 And in closing, just before we close for lunch, we're going to welcome back Nathan Scott to round us up for the morning session on a very inspirational talk, just to keep your thinking moving forward, the science of motivation. So apologies for anyone who thought I was rubbish the first time you've got me again. Right, so this is a very different topic to what I covered first up, but I want you to think about how you actually operate within your own business. And one of the things we really need to try and be aware of is the fact that in your everyday life you have various levels of control and influence over things that you might be worried about within your business, or things that are happening in and around your business. So we talk about this thing called the sphere of control and influence. And essentially we have some things that we can only ever be concerned about. We can't actually influence them. We certainly can't control them. So what's the first one that comes to your mind when you think of that? Weather, absolutely. The problem is we spend a lot of time and a lot of energy worrying about things that we can't do a bloody thing about. Now it's very easy for me to stand here and tell you don't do it. It's very hard for us to actually be able to change the way we go about it. But in everyday lives managing a farm you have all of these various things going on at any one time. Your aim is to try and drag as many of those into the center of that sphere of control and influence as you possibly can. So there are things there that we can absolutely control. There are some things that we can influence and there are others that we can only ever be concerned about. So we can only ever be concerned about the weather but we can absolutely control our stocking rate in response to what climatic conditions we've got at the time. And so we need to be more conscious of that in the way we go about things. That's the first thing I want you to think about. The next thing is to think about what actually motivates us. Why do we do the things that we do? Why do we do them the way that we do them? And I want you to think about this in terms of yourself, in terms of your family that works on the farm, employees that work on the farm. We can actually think about and have a better influence over the way that we all react in our day to day lives. And the first thing to think about when we think about motivation and there are three key things that I'm gonna talk about. What do you think, what motivates you? What's a good motivator? Holidays is a really good one, it should motivate you. I actually spend a lot of time with my clients making sure that every one of them has a holiday booked in and booked in advance that they can't get out of because we're all, and I'm as bad as anyone. My wife always books them and makes sure that I'm gonna go on a holiday because otherwise what happens is the calendar just keeps getting filled up and we never go on a holiday. So holidays is a really good one but what if we talk about the industry and I've heard it quite a few times today, what's the profit proposition gonna be? What's the value proposition? Is profit a good motivator? You think so? I've got clients who do the equivalent of drive a brand new BMW off a cliff each year just in school fees. Now if I go to them and say, hey, if we do this, you're gonna make an extra $5,000 profit. Do you think they give a shit? Not really. It's not a great motivator. They're already pretty comfortable. They're pretty comfortable with the fact that they're driving a brand new BMW off a cliff each year in school fees. So the extra $5,000 doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. What if I went to them and said, if we achieve this, you'll be in the top 5% of sheep producers in the country. It's a very different response from people because they want that. The outcome's exactly the same. To me, profit's an outcome. It's not a motivator. I need my clients to be profitable. The more profitable they are, the more likely they are to spend money on me. It's very selfish for you of it, that's the reality. I need my clients to be profitable, but it's an outcome, not a motivator. So the key motivators I want you to think about, autonomy, that's the ability to be the master of your own destiny. Do things your own way. We're pretty lucky in farming because we've got stacks of autonomy. But think about it in terms of the other people in your business. Are you breathing down their neck all the time? Or are you letting them have some of that control to be able to figure out their own way to do it? The next one is mastery, and that's the one I use a lot. So when I'm talking to clients, we rarely talk about profit. But I do talk about them being the best. Mastery is being the best you can possibly be. And the third one is purpose. And that's about being part of something much bigger than yourself. That's about, it's one of the reasons why I show you things like the video of the robots cutting up the carcass. How much more money is that gonna make you? It doesn't make you money. The actual robot cutting up the carcass isn't necessarily gonna make you money. And you just heard from, that we're gonna see that flow back in. The reason I show it to you though is, because I know you wanna be a part of an industry that is making progress. It doesn't have to be you. It doesn't have to be you that's making the more money each time. You wanna be a part of something bigger than yourself. It's the same reason why across my client base we have a really high uptake of pain relief for landmarking. Not for mulesing, just talking about for marking. And I can't give them a demonstrated commercial benefit of them doing it. But everyone who uses it says we'll never go back. And that's not anything to do with making more money. That's about being part of something bigger than themselves. That's about being part of an industry that they can be proud of. Something where they can put their hand on their heart and say we are doing the best thing we can possibly do. So it gives them the hit of both, mastery and purpose. What I want you to think about is what is it? What's the fire in your belly? Because ultimately that's what you need to know. If you want people to work for you, if you want people to achieve, if you want to understand yourself, you need to know what you believe in. Change doesn't happen because you ask for it. Change will happen because you inspire it. So if you want people to do things for you, you want people to help you achieve things, so it's people in your team, which could be family, could be employees, then you need to show them why we're trying to do it. What is it that we're actually trying to achieve? What do we believe in? And we start thinking about the way our brain actually works. How does the science, what does the science tell us about how your brain works? Really simple one on motivation. If we come along to a day like this, you could go home with a to-do list. Whole bunch of things that you could go home they're going to implement. Now, this is from another conference that I spoke at, but someone could have gone home with that as their list. Now, the reason that we all love to-do lists, and you all write them, is because every single time we cross something off, you get hit a dopamine. Now, dopamine is the neurochemical that makes you feel good. It's the same thing that's heavily linked to addiction. So alcohol, drugs, gambling, all those things is because each of those gives you constant feeding of dopamine into your system. Makes you feel good, makes you want to do it again. That's why to-do lists work, because we get this hit a dopamine. And to prove it, I know that you have all done this, where you've got your to-do list and you will write something on the bottom that you've just done, so that you can cross it out. And the reason is because you still get the hit a dopamine when you do that. Even though it's got nothing to do with all the things that are actually on your to-do list. Social media and the addiction to our phones. I get in trouble for it all the time at home. Stop looking at your phone. But it's because every time someone follows you on Twitter, every time someone likes something on Facebook, even every time you get a text message or an email, you hear that noise, you get a hit a dopamine. So for those of you that aren't already, you can follow me at a cheebag. Keep feeding me the dopamine. But it is true, every time we get that ding on your phone, the sound, the notification goes off, you get a hit a dopamine. Someone likes me. Someone wants to be a part of something I'm doing. It's great. But that's why we become addicted to these things. The problem with a to-do list like this, if you look at each of those items on there, they are too all-encompassing. They're too big. What does that mean, improve lamb survival? How the hell am I going to do that? And what happens when we've got things that are too big? Our brain doesn't cope with it. And procrastination kicks in. Now, some of us are particularly good at procrastinating. And my best example is when I was at uni, took me a little while to get through uni. That's a different story. If I had an assignment due, theoretically, there's an amount of work to be done and there's an amount of time before the due date. It would make perfect sense to work studiously away at that until you had had it done. What do you reckon I did? LAUGHTER And we fill that void with a whole lot of other stuff. Predominantly useless stuff. And if you think about it, it is the sole reason that things like YouTube exist. And that's because if we didn't procrastinate, we would never find this stuff. I did find that when I was supposed to be building the presentation. So the problem is, if we take that, that's too all-encompassing. It allows us to procrastinate, which isn't going to help us get there. So the next step is to think, how can we break it down into manageable tasks? The problem is, if I just take these top two and I break them down, that's what they start to look like. All of a sudden, I've got this really long-to-do list. And that creates a real challenge for us. And it introduces us to the paradox of choice. And this is one of the... Out of everything I've ever done, all the sheep research, all the stuff that MLA, AWI and everyone do, this alone is the single best bit of research I've ever found. Because it explains so much of what happens to us. The paradox of choice. A university set up two jam stalls in a park. In one of them, they had 24 different varieties of jam. In the other one, they only had six. For all the people who walked past, 60% of people stopped to look when there was 24 varieties of jam. Only 40% of people stopped to look where there was only six varieties of jam. 3% of people bought jam where there was 24. 30% of people bought jam where there was only six. So 100 people walked past. Less than two people actually bought jam where there was 24 options. 12 people bought jam where there was only six. If we give ourselves too many options, we make no decision at all. If you think about Audi supermarket, you walk in and you say, I want biscuits. You get there and you go, that'll be those biscuits. Because they don't give you too many options. There is a genuine reason for it. Because you go in, you say, I want biscuits, you grab biscuits, you walk out. You walk into Coles or Woolworths and you stand there and you look at it and you think, and in the end you don't make a decision, you walk off and you go and get something else. Give ourselves too many options, we don't make any decision at all. And that's the problem with it to do this like this. It becomes overwhelming for our brain. You look at it and you think, I don't know which one I should be doing. And so we don't do any of them. So we start thinking about, well, how can we prioritize it? Maybe we should prioritize it into A's, B's and C's. That'll work. That draws our attention to the A's, doesn't it? The problem is, when do the C's get done? Either never or when they become an A. So like service the ute was a C until it started making that horrible noise and it becomes an A. And that's a problem for us. But if I take this same to-do list, every single one of those items you can see there and I put them into a calendar, that's one month, that's every one of those items in that calendar. It's not that daunting, is it? If we just take them from a to-do list, put them into your calendar, you still get to cross them off when they're done. So you still get your hit of dopamine. The difference is as you sit there and you look at that whole list, it's not that overwhelming. And it allows us to make that progress. Often our biggest challenge is actually starting. Most of the time we get caught up in our own heads and we don't make the start. So what I want you to think about, we need to know what motivates us and how our brain works. I said earlier in my first presentation that we need to set goals and I want you to sit there and write down a goal at some point. And I don't want you to set little ones, I want big goals. Couple of little things, when you set a goal, if you type your goal, it only requires eight muscle functions. If you write, handwrite your goal, it uses 22,000 neurological functions. And as soon as you do that, it helps commit that to your conscious brain. So that your brain becomes much more aware of that as a goal, as opposed to just typing it. So handwrite your goals. And I always say to people, don't tell anyone. Why would I say don't tell anyone? The reason is, I also said I want you to set big goals, didn't I? You set yourself a big goal and you tell someone about it. What's the first thing they're gonna tell you? That won't work. You can't do that. My whole thing is just because no one else has done it, doesn't mean it can't be done. And that's exactly how we go about it with our client base. So just as a little example of how this works in your brain. I decided a little while ago, I really want to do it Jeep Wrangler. Not because they're any good, because they're pretty confident we know they're not. I just want one. Now, what do you think happens the minute I decide I want a Jeep Wrangler? You see them everywhere, don't you? Why had I never noticed them before? Because it wasn't important to me. What your brain does all day, every day, is filter every bit of information that comes in front of you. Because if it didn't, you'd go insane. The overload of stimulus would be too much for you and you would go insane. So what it does is it subconsciously makes all these decisions for you. Don't need to know that, don't worry about that, don't worry about that. The minute I said I want a Jeep Wrangler, there's one, there's one, there's one. It's the same if you decide I want to go overseas. I want to go to Canada. All of a sudden you see cheap flights to Canada. Next thing you're at a party and you hear someone talking over there and they've got a Canadian accent and you're over there having a chat to them. Now you know where to go. Now you've possibly got somewhere to stay. People say, oh, it must be fate. I don't believe in fate. Fate is the excuse for what your brain actually achieves for you. Your brain does all of that filtering and what we classes fate is actually the fact that you made a conscious decision, brought into your conscious brain and that started filtering all that information in rather than out. And that's how it works. So my view is that things don't just happen, you make them happen. And part of that is if you want to be better, if you want to achieve more, you want to achieve a certain thing on your property, in your business, for your family, then sit down and write the goals. I never, ever want any of you to aim to be average. I think we spend too much time talking about averages. Averages can be very, very deceiving. A man drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches. We can be easily deceived by averages, but also if you aim to be average, you're probably gonna fall short of average or you might achieve average, but that's still not what you're capable of. One thing with our clients, I'm not a massive fan of benchmarking in terms of production, mainly because I don't think we know where we're going until we get there. I don't think we know what's possible. The science tells us what's possible. In terms of what we can achieve within our businesses, I want the science to tell me and then I want to go and achieve it. And if no one else is achieving it, that's still not relevant to me. If the science tells me we can do it, then that's what we're aiming for, is to be the best. So just to finish off, as an industry in general, I think that we need more leadership. I think all of you have a responsibility to be leaders, within your families, within your business, within your community, within our bigger, wider industry. I think as an industry, we have far too many people that talk about they. They should do this, they should do that. They shouldn't have done it that way. I don't know who they are, but they sound like a pack of bastards to me. The reality is it's not their industry. Whoever they are, it's not their industry. It's ours, we are the industry. So we've got to take some ownership of it as a collective. Now whether that means taking some technology and bringing it into your business, whether it means just sitting and setting proper goals for your business, making sure everyone in the business understands what it is that you're trying to achieve. I said earlier, whatever we do well today, we can do better tomorrow. That's what I truly believe. Thanks very much.