Thursday, September 7, 2017

Building relationships with authenticity

Authenticity is about owning who you are. Timidity (or worse, outright dishonesty) about your true character is an insidious repellent to making real friendships. The people who actually would be your friends won't see that they have anything in common with you if you aren't real with them. 

Defend the things you care about


Don't let anybody trash talk what's important to you. Your religion, your family, your livelihood, your person. Don't shy away from having an argument with someone you should argue with. That's much better than secretly resenting that person and communicating that your convictions don't really matter that much to you. In defending your convictions, you strengthen your ability to have them.

If you're ashamed of something, figure out if you should be


I know some people will disagree with me (but I'm owning it anyway), but there are some things that we do that we really should be ashamed of. I think the best gauge to use is the law of God, since it's not subjective like your own ideas about morality. 

Given that we're talking about making radical changes to the way we live, I only want the best standard to tell me how I should and shouldn't live. And that's going to be looking back to Moses, to the psalms and proverbs, the thundering of Isaiah, the sermons of Jesus, and the writings of Paul.

If it's something that really is shameful, let it go


The key to authenticity is making your public self and your private self the same person. If you can't do that because you're rightly ashamed of yourself, then you'll always keep your true friends at bay. The only person you're fooling is yourself if you think you can lead a double life, because you won't be able to lead either life very well. It's an ugly thing to love something that you can't share with the world.



Authenticity has important applications in network marketing. It's why it's so important to really believe in the industry and the products your company offers because people will see right through you if you don't. You'll have no desire or interest in talking about it if you secretly hate your company. True convictions are contagious.

Saturday, September 2, 2017

Immediate action: your most powerful asset

Immediate action 

The principle of immediate action is a simple, but important concept in business. Briefly stated, whenever you know you need to do something, do it immediately. Ten minutes from now it could be too late: your energy and excitement to do it might be lost. The world is liable to move on without you if you wait around for what you think is the right time.

Now obviously, the principle only includes actions that make sense for you to do. For example, don't call someone at 3AM if you remember at 3AM that you need to call that person. But if it's during normal business hours and it's something you could sensibly do now, then just do it now.

What are a couple of parameters to know if the thing is something you need to do now? Here are three:

1) You planned to do it now


How often do we make plans to do something and then when the time comes, we still don't want to do it? In this case, making the plan was a complete waste of time. When the time comes, trust that you were in a better frame of mind when you made the plan, and do what you need to do immediately.

2) You know it's the right thing to do


There's no way you'll keep up with the other guy if you don't know how to listen to your intuition. Your intuition isn't infallible, but it doesn't need to be. The point is to exercise your judgement and your willingness to trust your instincts. You need your instincts sharp so they'll serve you better on future occasions.

3) It won't take you that long to do


If it'll be done in fifteen minutes or less, just do it now. If it's something like cleaning and reorganizing your office, make a plan for it and do it in pieces. You'll create this great rhythm for your day where you move from one thing to the next and you're training yourself to act in that rhythm.


Useful activity is both a curative and a preventive medicine against all sorts of problems. Don't you want that now and not maybe next week sometime? So start taking immediate action with the things that are important to you. If you're looking for a place to start, you can subscribe for future updates, or by send me an email to let me know what you think.

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Pastor Sam: a tale of tenacity

I spent the day yesterday with my good friend pastor Sam. This is a man who has not yet received his reward. The retired preacher moves slowly around his house on two canes with his voice just below a whisper. As soon as his wife left the house, he handed me a flat head screwdriver.

"Door pins." He whispered. So we took the doors off their hinges and he handed me a tape measure. 
"Desk," he whispered. "In the basement." I don't like to say 'no', so I measured out a thirty inch metal deskthat  needed to go through a thirty inch doorway at the top of a fleight of stairs. 

I'd have given up at this point, but Sam is man forged out of something else. In spite of all the setbacks, he was always ready to try something else. The legs don't come off? See if the desktop does. Can't get the hinges off the doors? Get my ratchet set and I'll pull that desk apart piece by piece. 

Sam's attitude was that he would outlast the problem, whatever it was. Just keep trying something else and eventually the problem will give up. He never got frustrated. He waited for the desk to get frustrated.

This is the tenacity that we need in our businesses. We need to absolutely refuse to quit until we've met our goal, then we need to move on to the next goal. However long it takes. It takes Sam a long time just to get across the room or to communicate something. But he's going to get there without fail.


Here's a practical tip: find someone tougher than you and spend a few hours with him once in a while. Tenacity is contagious.

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Turn your team members into gold with these five support tips

Success in network marketing involves having (or developing) a skill in training your people to be at least as successful as you are. Since your associates are great people, I want to talk about a couple of great ways you can support them and get them off on the best start (or restart!). 

1) Do calls with them


 Once the person has drawn up an initial list of contacts, sit down with them (either in person or over video chat) and do some calls with them. That means listening in to their calls and also letting them listen in to a few of yours. Never expect your people to do something that you aren't willing to do yourself. During these calls, just listen, don't say anything. Stick to positive reinforcement by noting everything they do correctly, and don't worry too much about what they're doing wrong. Sometimes the biggest barrier when it comes to making calls is just doing it while skill at it comes later. If you start them out making calls and give them good feedback, they'll never have time to develop anxiety about it.

2) Have a good list of training tools that will help them


An advantage you'll have over people just coming in to this business is knowing which training materials are and aren't very helpful. That means whenever you see a video or read a book or article that's exceptional, add it to a list with a little note about why it's important. Business best practices and product information are the most important. Keep your list of links as lean as possible so it's accessible to newer people.

3) Connect them with upline leaders


If you're in a good company, you ought to have access to someone that's been really successful with it. A quick call or lunch with a person who has become rich from doing what you're teaching is very important to make the whole thing come to life for your person. It's one thing to tell them they can earn a hundred thousand dollars a month: it's another to sit them down with a real, down to earth person who's doing it.

4) Help them set goals, and mark their victories


Obviously, if your company has ranks, recognize your people when they advance in rank, possibly with a special team meeting solely for that purpose. You might also recognize them for things like weight loss goals if you've got a health product. You can always congratulate them when it looks like they're meeting their goals here. I think the best kind of goals to set are regular activity goals. For example, when the person spends a full month talking to five, ten, twenty, or thirty leads a day about the business (whatever the personal goal is that they set), recognize that. Maybe even congratulate them with prizes, because that skill and regular activity is what will lead them to success.

5) Connect them with a power partner


If you have two people with similar business goals, get them together. When your business is thriving the way it's supposed to, you won't have time to give everyone in your organization the attention you would give your best friend on an ongoing basis. But if you can set your people up to be friends, that enables you to give them the benefit of strong social connections in the business. People with strong friendships in the company are more likely to stay loyal to your company when others tempt them. They also have an ongoing source of validation as they see each other meeting and overcoming the same challenges. You may also consider matching your people based on how competitive or cooperative they are. Some people are really energized by friendly competition, whereas others are put off by it.


Network marketing is changing the way people think about work and business. It provides you with a way to change people's lives by putting you in a position to give them training and support to be successful. But it starts with you. Send me an email and you can get the training you need and get started today in the best industry in the world today.

Monday, August 28, 2017

Leveraging your laziness--The easy way!



I had a math teacher that used to preface everything he said with the words, "I'm real lazy". A lazy man doesn't multiply his denominators any bigger than they neerd to be. Laziness has kind of a bad reputation, but I think this is because it's easy to underutilize laziness and not accomplish much with it. What's needed is focused laziness.

I'm lazy, so I'll keep the core technique simple. Laziness, at its core, is the avoidance of work. The rule is to remain lazy, but rather than avoid all work, only avoid unnecessary work. For any given task, ask: "What's the easiest way to do this without letting the quality suffer?" That's critical: the quality of the product must always remain excellent as you seek to spend less energy on it.

Here's an example. One common problem in network marketing is finding new contacts. What I used to do was try to make friends in Facebook groups with people I thought would be interested in my business. A much easier approach is to just friend people through the "People you may know" tool, then count them as leads later after they've Liked or commented on my business posts. Here, you end up with much better results (only talking to people who are interested in what you're doing) with a lot less energy.

I think much of the problem is the mindset we pick up as hourly employees. I used to have a coworker that wore a t-shirt that said, "If I'm not moving very fast, it's because I'm paid hourly". I knew exactly what it was talking about because I'm not any better than him. 

There's a constant tension in hourly work between the employee wanting to drag the work out as long as possible (so you don't have to do as much during the shift), and the employer pushing his people to work more. The sweet spot for the employee is to maintain the illusion of busyness. We have to break ourselves of that as entrepreneurs and channel our laziness to a higher purpose. We want the best result in the least time, not mediocrity spread out over the course of many ten dollar hours.

How do we get there? One way is by building mastermind groups with like-minded people, like what we do in our network marketing business. I don't know a better way to build a business than by getting a bunch of lazy people together and talking about how to do it in the fastest and easiest way. So reach out to me and let's talk about how to build something great together.

Friday, August 25, 2017

Three means of achieving perfect outcome independence

I wrote yesterday about the concept of outcome independence, that is, not worrying about the results of your actions. So what should we focus on then? Here are three healthy foci that you can control because they're all based on your actions.

1) Focus on the process. Here your interest needs to shift off of what you can achieve through the process and on to mastery of the process itself. Your focus, moment by moment, is on performing the tasks necessary for your business with as much excellence as possible. You might try to improve your quality or your speed as you compete against your previous record. 

You become fearless because your objectives have nothing to do with what will happen. We have no control over the outcome, but we have complete control over our own actions. So if you master the actions that tend to produce the outcome you want, you're more likely to get what you want than if you'd remained a novice.

2) Focus on doing good for others. You can't go wrong by doing right. If you see a kid drowning in a pool, you aren't thinking about how silly you'll look with wet clothes or about how poor of a swimmer you are. You're the only one that can help him and it doesn't matter what's in your way. 

You can find that same energy for helping others through your business. In order for this to work, obviously your service needs to be one that actually does good for others in a way you're passionate about. 

3) Focus on pleasing God. The first line of my catechism says the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. If you ever wondered what the meaning of life is or what your purpose is, this is it: it's literally what you were created to do. Moreover, God is the only one with any control over the outcome, and is the rewarder of the proud doer.

This is the highest level we can operate on, but it's also the most difficult to stay on because of our tendency to corrupt our dealings with God. But you're unstoppable while you're walking with the Lord in your business, judging every action you take by what God thinks of it.

I think it's best to have all three foci in view, namely because you can use the first two as your means to do the third. Try to maintain a balance between thinking about mastery and thinking about helping others. Mastery adds skill to helping others, while helping gives context to your mastery, while glorifying God gives purpose to both. 


Remember to follow my posts and reach out to me with any thoughts you have. Thanks!

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Getting what you want: a quick breakdown

One of the great challenges in business is figuring out how to get other people to do what you want them to do. You'll be out of business if nobody buys your product or joins your opportunity, so, ultimately, we need people to do one of these two things. How do we go about getting this outcome? 

I want to note first that I'm not interested in using techniques that manipulate people into doing what I want. I've never been very good at manipulation and I don't want learn now. Since I want lifelong business relationships with people, I want to cultivate goodwill with them by doing right by them. So we have an outcome we want and we want to get there ethically. 

Let's look at things from our customer's perspective. I'm imagining my customer is a single factory worker. He works twelve hour days doing the same motions all day and comes home to collapse at the computer every night. His feet and elbows hurt all the time and his fingers feel like stones. Does he want another problem? No, of course not. So suppose we come to him communicating that we have this huge problem where we need to find people to join our business, and, oh, wouldn't he like to have that problem too! "No thanks," he'll say. He's got enough trouble in his life as it is.

We need to offer him solutions to his problems (like a prebuilt business model that'll get him out of factory work), but also we need to communicate a neutral attitude to whether our own problems ever get solved. And I think the best way to communicate that we have a neutral attitude to getting our problems solved is by actually having a neutral attitude to getting our problems solved.


I see two good ways to get there, which I'd like to write about tomorrow. So click follow and stay tuned!