In month 6, the yoga studios continued bringing in approximately the same $4,000 in retail sales. By then, I had talked with all the yoga instructors at the studios. Some signed up and did a little, some signed up and didn’t do much, and some never signed up at all. Meanwhile Nicole had been chugging along with her own retail sales and building a team. In month 6, Nicole’s team generated over $15,000 in sales.
At month 12, Nicole’s team generated almost seven times the volume and income of the yoga studios. They were at about $3,000 a month, and Nicole was over $20,000 a month.
Fast forward three years. The yoga studios were generating about $1,500 a month in products. Nicole’s team was generating over $150,000 a month! That’s 100 times the volume. Nicole is a leader. She had built a team. She had duplication. She was developing other leaders in her downline. She was making over $5,000 a week – and growing!
Income disclaimer: As in any independent business, the level of success or achievement is dependent upon the commitment, skill level, drive, and desire to succeed of the individual. Success results only from effective sales efforts, which require hard work, diligence, and leadership.
Leaders, Leaders, Leaders
When you are looking to build to last, set your mind on recruiting and developing leaders. Your goal is NOT just to become a leader yourself (although you need to do that first). Your ultimate goal is to become a leader of leaders within your company. What you need to be thinking in the morning when you get up, all throughout the day, and until you go to bed at night is: I’m looking for leaders. Personally, I would rather have one true leader than 100 people who are half in. That’s how valuable a leader is to you if you want to become a leader of leaders.
Want to know if you have this leadership piece down? Ask yourself how your team is doing. Not how are you doing, how is your team doing? How would they do without you? Without duplicating leadership, you haven’t built to last. You have a business that is dependent on YOU.
Action Steps
1. Make a list of the “leaders of leaders” you admire in your company or within the network marketing industry as a whole.
2. Working with the above list, what do they do differently than others? What type of people are they? How do they make other people feel? What skills do they possess that you admire?
3. To assist yourself in training your mind to think leadership thoughts and “becoming a leader of leaders” thoughts, put reminders around your house, in your car, on your phone, and elsewhere, saying things like:
I am becoming a leader of leaders.
I’m looking for leaders, not followers.
I am a leader.
Chapter 2
BUILD TO LAST AND LEGACY
Leadership is not about the next election,
it’s about the next generation.
— Simon Sinek
Network marketing trainers, companies, and leadership all love talking about “finding your WHY.” And not just any old WHY, but “a WHY that makes you cry.” These WHYs come in different forms depending on a distributor’s current life situation. Common WHYs include to stay at home with your kids, to pay off your credit cards, to go on a vacation, to get out of debt, to experience greater meaning in life.
When we talk about finding your WHY, initially it’s your reason for getting started in the network marketing business – something that excites and motivates you, and holds you accountable when you’re less motivated to do the daily work. As you progress in the business, your WHY progresses with you. As you start to accomplish your goals and see success, your personal situation changes. Maybe that credit card is paid off or you are now able to stay at home or take the vacation.
The Ultimate WHY – Leaving a Legacy
I want to share with you what I believe to be the ultimate WHY for a professional network marketer. Leaving a legacy. If you’re a true leader of leaders (or that’s what you’re striving for), leaving a legacy eventually becomes your WHY. Leaders of leaders’ WHY becomes bigger than themselves.
Leaving a legacy is about making life better for those who follow you than it was for you. It’s about showing people how to live better than they ever dreamed possible. Leaving a legacy starts with you, touches those you directly influence, and eventually leads to generational change.
Leaving a legacy has nothing to do with money. That is an inheritance. An inheritance leaves money in someone’s checking account. Your legacy leaves something in their heart and in their soul. Leaving a legacy is about you becoming the best possible version of yourself, and being that person day in and day out. By becoming your best self, you become the type of person who can effect positive change on those you touch – people you work with directly in your downline, family members, people in your community. Your living and teaching a certain way of life influences them. It’s the feeling you give people. The confidence you instill in them. Leaving a legacy is about you being the person who tells them they’re good enough, they’re worthy, and they can live the big, beautiful, bold dream they have tucked away. Leaving a legacy is about living up to your full potential, and then mentoring others through modeling to live up to their full potential.
The effect of the work you have done doesn’t stop there. For over ten years now both in my personal life and in my business, I have followed the principle of “seven generations of change,” which I learned from a Native American elder. In short, the principle says:
Our lives are impacted by the seven generations before us, and our lives will impact the next seven generations.
Our focus is on the latter. If I become my best self as a husband, father, mentor, leader, community member, and friend, this obviously has a positive effect on the type of life I live. It affects my happiness, my overall sense of wellbeing, my contentment, my sense of purpose, my relationships. When I work to become my best self, I get the positive life experiences and emotions that go along with that. It also touches my children because of what I model for them. They learn and model this behavior. And my children model for my grandchildren, who model for my great grandchildren, and so on. This is the concept of seven generations of change, which helped me realize my life is so much bigger than just me.
Considering seven generations also made things simpler for me, and it can make things simpler for you too. When we look at our decisions and the effects they will have seven generations down the road, the “right” decision becomes clear. When we look at the hard things we need to do and realize that it’s not just going to affect us or our kids but the next seven generations, the hard things seem that much more worthwhile. It becomes natural to think more deeply and act more wisely about our choices and actions. We think more about what we say, how we spend our time, even what our thoughts are.
What Are You Leaving in the Hearts and Souls of Others?
I’m not talking about learning new skills or tactics. Think about people who changed the course of history for their generation and the generations after them – leaders like Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Oprah, Rosa Parks. When you think about them and the change they initiated, you think of their way of being in the world. The firmness in their mission and vision. Their unshakeable faith. These leaders stood for what they believed in and their vision and dream created movements, which led to generational change. We who followed after Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr., for generations to come live differently because of them.
What are you leaving in the hearts and souls of those you touch? Is it something you want passed down for seven generations? Who are you modeling? You don’t have to be a Gandhi or Rosa Parks (although you could be), but you can model your behaviors on the way they lived. You can bring that type of energy into your everyday life and your business.
Don’t make the mistake of dreaming small with your business. So many people get involved in network marketing and don’t understand the enormity of the opportunity.
Set the Intention for Wha
t You’re Building
A few years back, a handful of the male leaders in our company (which is 90 percent female) decided to create a company-wide event for men. We wanted to train other men on what we, as male leaders, were doing to see success.
We brought in high-profile speakers from outside our company and leaders within our company. My personal sponsor Bob and I were asked to do a presentation together. We chose to address the topic of leaving a legacy. I was excited about the opportunity to speak, and even more eager to listen to the other presenters at this event. I had looked up to these men for years. Many were founding distributors with our company, putting them a “generation” ahead of me. I had studied many of them from afar and never gotten close with them. I just kept my head down and did my thing for the most part.
During the event, I had a huge internal shift. I had flown below the radar in our company and was never comfortable in the spotlight. I had had a mental construct of seeing the other male leaders within our company as “more” or “better” than I was, even if I earned more than they did and had a larger organization. My big internal shift came because of the feedback Bob and I received around our presentation. At the end of the event, men we admired shared with us that our presentation was completely “eye opening.” They had never before come across the leaving-a-legacy principle or our approach to building our business. We heard over and over that people intended to implement everything we taught. The biggest aha for me came from seasoned distributors saying they wished they’d had this training from the start.
I began to realize that not only did Bob and I build differently than others in our industry, but our intention from the outset was different, and that intention led to significantly different results over time.
Income Is Not the Real Gift,
a Changed Life Is
Many of us make the mistake of thinking income is the big gift and promise of our industry. The income you can make (if you do it right) will indeed far surpass your expectations. That’s not the real gift in this business, though. The real gift is being the person you have to become in order to earn the income. That’s the gift. There are no shortcuts to the top in this industry. You have to become a person capable of achieving success yourself before you can mentor others to success. The blessing of this business is that the more bright, shiny, happy, content, loving, and gracious you become, the more success you see. The better version of you that you become, the more you earn. The money is the byproduct of a better you!
Becoming the best possible version of yourself, so you can help others become the best possible version of themselves, is not easy work. It’s simple – and in the remaining three chapters of this section, I’m going to show you how to do it – but it’s not easy. The reward is a changed life, for you, the people you touch, and the seven generations down the road.
Action Steps
It’s time to dream big and dream beautiful. Set aside a few hours to create in your mind the life you want to live and the impact you want to leave. Work through the following exercises in a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted.
1. Think 5 years into the future. Who have you become? What is your ideal self? What will your day-to-day activities look like? What will your relationships be like? What type of home or homes will you have? Will you be traveling? Think of all aspects of your life and describe the most beautiful vision you can.
2. Think 20 years into the future. Who have you become? What is your ideal self? What will your day-to-day activities look like? What will your relationships be like? What type of home or homes will you have? Will you be traveling? Think of all aspects of your life and describe the most beautiful vision you can.
3. Think about the generations who are going to follow you. What type of impact would you like to have on them? What do you want to leave in their hearts? What is YOUR LEGACY going to be? Write it out.
Chapter 3
THE BUILD-TO-LAST MINDSET
Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.
— Harold S. Geneen
A leader’s philosophy on life and how to build a network marketing business is significantly different from that of distributors who are not leaders. In order to start leading others, you must first lead yourself. Following are seven core philosophies for leading yourself.
1. Leaders focus on who they are becoming more than what they are getting.
A leader’s mindset is not about activities, rewards, or accolades. It’s about who she or he is becoming. A leader knows it’s not possible to hold the title or rank of leader long-term without becoming a person capable of doing so. Leading is about changing yourself from the inside out. Leaders are focused on who they are becoming versus what they’re getting.
2. Leaders don’t just believe they can, they know they will.
There is a vital difference between believing you can do something and knowing without a doubt that you will do it. Those who become leaders in network marketing don’t just believe they can achieve success, they know they will.
Here is a quick story to illustrate my point.
My personal sponsor, Bob, tried to get me to become a distributor for six months. He messaged me over and over. I got sick of getting his messages, tired of hearing about this “opportunity,” fed up with all the pictures on social media. I didn’t want to hear it anymore. I was annoyed enough to “un-friend” Bob on Facebook. I told him I didn’t want to do this “network marketing thing” that he was involved in.
Not only did I not want to do it, I thought Bob had gone crazy. During this time he was working full-time, married with two children and two other children from a previous marriage. He kept telling me he intended to shut down his law practice and be a full-time network marketing professional. My reaction: “Dude, you’re crazy. I would love to do something like that. It sounds great, but this is the real world. You’re married. You’ve got four kids. You’ve got a law practice. You’ve got your home. You have all these responsibilities. You can’t just shut down your legal office and go full-time into network marketing.” But Bob had a vision of making that a reality in his life.
So what happened? Why did everything change for me? Why did I decide, one day, to sign up and build a large organization? Because Bob had an internal shift at our company’s annual event.
Prior to that event, Bob believed in our products. He believed in the business opportunity. He believed in the leaders at the corporate level and the leaders within the network. He also believed he could be successful at this business. He had already had some success. Then the shift happened. At the annual event Bob met others who were having big success. He met some of the leaders at corporate. And he met some of the leaders in the field. Something clicked for Bob in the process of meeting all those leaders. He went from believing he could do this to knowing without a doubt that he was going to do it.
That piece is so important I want to highlight it. Bob shifted from believing he could do it to knowing he was going to do it. As a result, his energy changed. His mindset changed. And everything in his business changed. After he moved from just believing he could to knowing he would, I decided to sign up, as did many other people he had been messaging. That’s when Bob laid the foundation of his business and went on to become a full-time network marketing professional.
This knowing piece is the internal shift many would-be leaders never make. Where are you right now? Do you know without a doubt you’re going to build a large organization? You can go through the motions of talking with people all you want, but until you make the shift, they won’t be attracted to you or want to join you. Once you make the shift, they’ll see and feel that you are going to run with this opportunity and make something of it, with or without them. I saw that in Bob. I recognized that he saw something, and I didn’t want to be left behind.
3. Leaders don’t just “show up,” they show up with their mind right.
When I signed up to become a distributor, I wanted to bui
ld a big business and I knew it was possible. In order to do that, though, I needed to get to that place of knowing it was actually going to happen for me.
I needed to change my mindset from “can’t” to “can,” from “impossible” to “possible,” from thinking small to thinking big. I needed to release past failures and current excuses. I was sick and tired of all those little thoughts creeping into my subconscious. Thoughts telling me I wasn’t good enough. Worries about what if this happened, what if that happened? Thoughts telling me I wasn’t going to succeed. That negative, nagging voice went on and on and on. I had to change it. I had to shift from allowing those thoughts to control me, to controlling my own mindset.
Here is how I started. During my entire first year, I walked around repeating to myself over and over, “I can, I will, I am. I can, I will, I am. I can, I will, I am.” I lived in that mantra, saying it constantly in my mind – and sometimes it wasn’t just in my mind. Sometimes I moved through the day saying aloud, “I can, I will, I am. I can, I will, I am.”
Through the mentorship I had from both Bob and Craig, I knew early on that success in this business at the highest levels involves more than doing the daily activities of sharing products and business opportunities, and following up. If I wanted to build a large organization that would last, I had to create the right thoughts and feelings behind my actions. It’s not just about the actions. The actions are five percent. All the training your corporate company gives you is the five percent of it. Ninety-five percent of enduring success is the mindset, the thoughts, the feelings behind the actions you’re taking.
At some point in your business, the clichés you’re taught – “Be here a year from now” and “Just keep showing up” – are not enough. If you want to become a leader, you have to move past just showing up and into molding yourself into the type of person capable of leading a team.
Build to Last Page 3