Overcoming the Most Common Struggles and Blocks, Part 3: Tracey Walker on Seat Time

You came from a world where the same presentation got repeated every week, in the same room, to the same handful of people, and it worked. Now you’re staring at a blog, a lead capture page, an autoresponder, and a follow-up sequence, and it feels like you need a degree just to get started. Tracey Walker closes out this Unstoppable Mastermind series by taking that exact complaint apart in front of the room.

As someone who came into online marketing from a more traditional sales background, door to door, home meetings, the same script every time, you already feel the whiplash she’s describing. This isn’t simpler. It just looks like it should be.

Why Does This Process Feel So Much More Complicated Than What You Used to Do?

One man in the room, Herschel, lays out the complaint honestly: too much information for a new team member to absorb, too many moving pieces, nothing repeatable the way a weekly presentation was repeatable. Tracey doesn’t argue with the feeling. She reframes what’s actually happening underneath it.

So sometimes I believe, not necessarily in your case, but sometimes I believe that people don’t see the process because they’re not involved in the process. They’re looking at the process from an external point of view.

From the outside, any process looks like a pile of disconnected steps. From the inside, after you’ve actually run it a few times, it collapses into one motion: get an offer in front of people, and follow up with the ones who don’t act on it right away. Everything else, the lead page, the autoresponder, the sequence, is just the specific machinery for doing that one thing. The complexity people report is almost always a symptom of watching from a distance instead of actually running the steps themselves.

What Is Seat Time and Why Do Most People Refuse to Put It In?

Tracey’s word for the missing ingredient is seat time, the hours spent actually operating something, badly at first, until it becomes automatic. She compares it to learning a bulldozer. Nobody expects to sit down in the cab and move dirt correctly on the first try. You learn which lever does what through repetition, and eventually your hands know it without your brain narrating every step.

Her challenge to the room is pointed. As Tracey Walker puts it, “This is a learning institution. And 95% of the people don’t want to do seat time.” She contrasts that directly with how willingly people accept years of expensive schooling for a traditional career, no complaints about the time or the cost, while balking at spending two hours with a set of training videos before expecting results from a home business. Capability was never the problem. The words “home-based” and “make money online” have quietly taught people to expect instant, and instant was never actually on offer, in this industry or any other.

Is the Process Actually Hard, or Just Something You Haven’t Repeated Enough?

Put the machine in front of someone who skipped the seat time and ask them to run it, and the cracks show immediately. Forgetting the steps. Freezing on something they read about but never practiced. That’s not evidence the process is too hard. It’s evidence of exactly how many reps they’ve actually logged, which in most cases is close to zero.

As Tracey Walker sums it up, “I don’t think it’s hard. I think that it is easily avoided. And because it’s easily avoided, it is.” That’s the whole block, named plainly. Not too complicated to learn. Just easy enough to postpone, one more day, one more excuse, until postponing becomes its own habit.

• Complexity often lives in watching a process from the outside, not in the process itself once you’re actually running it.
• Seat time, repetition until something becomes automatic, is the real cost of entry, the same as it is for any other skill worth having.
• What feels like a hard process is usually just an avoided one, and the two are easy to confuse.

The full session goes further into how Tracey and her team actually structure that repetition for new members so it doesn’t feel as overwhelming as it did on day one. Create your free account and you can watch the whole session, plus download the audio, at empowernetwork.com/watch.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Simplify processes. Who said this? Somebody. Okay.

Simplify process. Herschel, what would you ask to be simple? Well, I mean, if you take the, so what I'm trying to figure out is, so if I have team members, for example, the process just seems so complicated, just seems like so much information that a person needs to grab and absorb. So even if you take Andrew, for example, he said he got the blog, you know, didn't really sound too authoritative.

The fact that he's going to blog and then it just doesn't seem simple enough versus me coming from the MLM world where it's the same thing every week. You go up and get the same presentation every week. It's the same three or people in door-to-door sales. It's the same thing.

So I'm able to get more, I feel like I'm more productive from that standpoint than I am over here. So I'm feeling like the process is not simple enough. Even sometimes when we talk about you know, you're like, oh, you need this, you need that. I'm like, dang, I need something else.

I've got to do this next time. I've got to spend all this time. Sometimes it takes me a long time. I'm like, I might be going through some, trying to figure out something, maybe three, four hours.

And so that process is just doesn't seem simple enough. And then I just feel I'm losing people in the wind because it's not simple enough. Okay, I got you. Okay, so here's the thing.

Let me just clear this up. The process by which we are doing what we are doing in itself is simple. I'm going to explain to you guys what the process is. Here's the process.

In direct sales, in terms of internet, this is what we are doing. We are taking an offer. Right? We're getting traffic to this offer.

We are then accepting the fact that not everybody's going to buy this offer upon their first contact with the offer. So then we are creating a follow-up sequence to massage the people who do not buy this offer until they eventually buy the offer. That's what we're doing. Right?

In a nutshell, that's what we're doing. Now, there are components to making this function. Like my man here, you've got machinery. Right?

If you say, what does a bulldozer do? What does a bulldozer do? Okay, that's what it does overall. But there are components that make the bulldozer work.

So the operator of the bulldozer must then understand how to operate this piece of machinery so that the machinery does the basic thing of that. So a person might be sitting in there. They've got to learn how to work this thing with the crane thing. Right?

Whatever it is that's going down. They've got to make it go dig deep. They've got to be able to turn. They've got to, whatever all this stuff that goes around.

I'm sure, is that some type of certification a person's got to go through to run this, drive this machine? You just have to have time. Time. And what is seat time?

Learning it. Okay. So this is what I'm saying. Right?

So what we're dealing with is that here's what our machine does. Our machine puts people in front of our offer and our goal is to convert the people into buying the offer. That's what our machine does. But we are operators.

We're independent operators of this machine. And everybody doesn't want to take the seat time. Some people want to operate this bulldozer without any experience of operating a bulldozer. They want the dirt to be moved.

But they don't want to learn how to operate the machine to move the dirt. Right? You make it handy. When I hear you say this, you put it in such a way that it's almost like a life lesson just saying, using it.

I did it for all these years. And new people want to say they didn't know how to do it. But you put them to the test. They've been doing it for six months.

I've got 20 years here. And it makes you feel better. It's like, I never started. I never did this.

You can hurt somebody. But if you do it, you do it in such a way you can really make a lot of money for someone else. See? So this is what happened.

This is a learning institution. And 95% of the people don't want to do seat time. Right? Because it's home-based business and it's make money online.

And that instantly means I'm going to do it instantly. That's what it means. It means I can go to school for 20 years and become a doctor and have $250,000 in debt. That's okay.

That's okay. But I'm not willing to take two hours to go through these videos to actually learn what the process is. So sometimes I believe, not necessarily in your case, but sometimes I believe that people don't see the process because they're not involved in the process. They're looking at the process from an external point of view.

They're saying, oh, there is a process. And they're saying, oh, but I don't like step one. I could do step two. I don't got time for step three.

Step four, just wipe that out altogether. Step five, okay, probably. Step six, that I can do. And they approach it from that angle.

Now you put them in the bulldozer and you put them to the test and say, go. And what happens? How you cut this thing on again? I forget.

Now I know I read about how I make this arm move. I did it before, but it's not second nature. It's not repetition is what we're looking for. So we have a process, but most people will not repeat the process enough for the process to become second hand.

I don't think it's hard. I think that it is easily avoided. And because it's easily avoided, it is.