MOTIVE-ation

Conversations From The Corner Office:
Re-posted from Richard Brooke's Blog.
Julia and I hope you all are having a great weekend. How is your business going?
Do you think it could be doing better? Are you really in your business or just sitting on the side lines?
Take a few minutes of your day and give this recent post a good read.
Julia and I have re-committed ourselves to helping people live their lives on their terms. This short blog really helped cement the deal.




MOTIVE-ation
Posted By: Richard B. Brooke
 Date Posted: June 4, 2010
SIGN A CONTRACT
INVEST MONEY
    (Perhaps that you don’t really have to risk.)
MEET NEW PEOPLE
INVEST TIME
    (Perhaps that you don’t really have.)
STAKE YOUR REPUTATION ON A PRODUCT OR SERVICE
    (And a company you don’t really know.)
ASK YOUR “NETWORK” TO TAKE A LOOK
    (Risk them saying “No” and, “You are rude to even ask.”)
All of the above are things a new distributor must do – and a lot more – to venture successfully into a new business. All of these actions carry a burden. They are hard … harder for some than others. They take physical effort, but more directly they take emotional effort.
As the business grows the list of activities grows to include travel, training, leadership, personal growth and more financial and time investment. All of this for an opportunity most new distributors are not sure will work … many are even sure it will not.
Every time we imagine doing something new or “hard,” we imagine (fantasize in our mind) what it will be like. Sure, we think of the endeavor itself – like investing money – but then we imagine what it will really be like to write that check or tap that already too-high credit card. We imagine how it will add to our stress, add to uncomfortable conversations with our spouse, and add to our debt load.
As we imagine, we feel the associated emotion. We feel it in every fiber of our body. It instantly changes our body chemistry. It changes our mood, our eyes and our voice. It shrinks us, making us small, both physically and emotionally. We become weak and cannot move past it. This is our Vision. And we act and attract in accordance with it.
Once you know this, you know WHY people shrink around our offer. Perhaps it is the words we choose to describe it. Perhaps it is our inability to paint an inspiring picture. Perhaps we are not clear how their imagination kills it for them. Perhaps they simply do not understand it and can only articulate their uncertainty by saying: “I don’t know anyone.”
So WHY would anyone pursue a new business with the passion and confidence required to pull it off? They won’t, unless they know WHY. And it is not enough to know WHY as a “thing,” like more money to pay off debts or cover that ever-escalating mortgage payment. To be able to name the “thing” is not enough. Our imagination muscle is far more inclined to “work out” the negative, and much less inclined to “work out” the positive.
Belief is the fire that crystallizes our fantasies, making them Visions. When we believe what we imagine, we drill it deeply by telling ourselves everything about it and feeling everything about it. It is much easier to believe something new will not work. It is so much easier to believe that more debt is bad and that risk is bad. Those thoughts immediately become Visions that compel us.
The reason anyone would take the risk and endure some pain, is to enjoy the feelings of success. Success is different for all of us. For some it may be free time. For others it may be new relationships or winning in competition. And for others, it may be financial abundance. We are all made up of a different blend of these values. The challenge we must overcome is mastering what those values are for us personally, and for everyone to whom we offer our opportunity. Without this mastery we are left to recruit by the numbers … and the numbers are not encouraging at all.
Roughly …

• 1% of us enjoy what we would define for ourselves as extraordinary success.
• 4% of us feel we are on a solid path to it.
• 45% of us have struggled for so long that we have rationalized how our lot in life is acceptable. In other words, we have given up.
• 50% of us never even got started, and we blame the rest of the world for our failures.

So if you are going to rely on the MOTIVE-ation of those you prospect, you are going to have to recruit 100 people to get five to even look at it in a positive light. Maybe two or three will pursue it, and maybe only one will create the kind of success you and they want.
Whoever said: “You cannot motivate other people” did not understand the role of a Leader. Leaders do motivate other people. They have to in order to have anyone to lead.
And here is how they do it …
It starts with Values, both imposed and core.
Imposed Values are those values our parents and society have pressed into our consciousness as having to be “valuable.” Our interpretation around these values is that if we don’t have them, we are bad people. Imposed values do motivate; they are limiting, but they are better than nothing.
Core Values are those values that define our own authentic, spiritual self (nothing to do with religion). These are the values we would love to express in life if we felt we had permission. Most people never discover their full set of core values. You can help them do so. Core Values are the truth about you and me. And our truth sets us free. Free to rock the world with our unique power and passion.
You can start the process of MOTIVE-ation by asking lots of curiosity questions. Not as though you are interviewing people, but rather conveying a genuine interest in knowing who they are, both at an imposed level and at their core. When you know the difference between imposed values and core values and you LISTEN with your heart, you can hear the difference in people. You can hear the passion, the energy, the heat in their voice as they talk about what is important to them.
Listen with your heart, not your head (or your values). And listen for the heat. When you hear the heat, drill down. That is where the “gold” lies buried. This is a process that can go on for years. And here is how it starts the motivation process:
First, when you become this kind of leader for others, you become someone unique in their lives. There are probably only a handful of people that have ever been so interested in them … interested at a heart level … unconditionally. Their mother and anyone that has ever fallen in love with them qualify. And you now fall into that category as well. People will open up to you because deep down all any of us really wants … more than fancy cars or homes or status … is to be known, accepted and loved anyway.
They will feel heard as you ask questions like:
Where do you live?
What do you like about it?
What don’t you like about it?
Where would you love to live?
What about that place does it for you?
What do you do for work?
What do you like about it?
What don’t you like about it?
What would you really love to do?
What about that does it for you?
Tell me about your family.
What do you love most about them?
What worries or frustrations do you have around them?
What would you love most to do for them?
If you could spend more time with them doing something, what would it be?
What do you do in your free time?
What about that is important to you?
What would you do if money were no object?
What would you do if you won the lottery or inherited a few million dollars?
What would you do first?
What would you do around work?
What would you do about where you live?
What would you do for your family?
What would you do with your hobbies, recreation and special interests?
What would you do if you learned you only had a few years to live?
What would you do if you learned your spouse or a child only had a few years to live?
What would you do around any of the above, if your parents wholeheartedly approved?
Every time you feel the heat, drill down and ask: “How would that make you feel?” Guide them to feel it.
These questions, and others you may intuit along the way, lead others to drill down into their own hearts to think about what is important to them. As they think about it, as they talk to themselves about it, they start to feel what it would feel like to experience it. Their body chemistry changes. Their mood changes. Their eyes and tone of voice tell a different story. Their energy changes and, most importantly, their power and passion for acting and attracting is dialed up a notch. They are, in this moment, En-VISION-ing something important to them and they are MOTIVE-ated to bring it to fruition.
In these moments they are not thinking and feeling anything about the risk, or the debt, or the fear of failure. It is not possible for the mind to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time. As long as they keep thinking about and feeling the picture you guided them to, they will be MOTIVE-ated to accomplish it.
So how do we keep them engaged? BELIEF.
It is one thing to think of success. It is quite another to believe in it so that your thinking of it is a natural, normal thought habit … something that is with you all the time, guiding your actions and attractions.
Belief is accomplished by the following:
Experience
If we have experienced this vision before, then we believe in it. If your prospect has earned $10,000 a month in a similar opportunity, then they will tend to believe they can, and will, do it again. In this case, you don’t have to do much motivating.
Spaced Repetition
The subconscious and emotional mind cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that has been vividly imagined. When you imagine success over and over and over and over again, it gradually grows as a truth in your heart and mind. As a leader, every time you guide someone to think about their vision, every time you ask them to look at their pictures, to read their affirmations, to talk to you about how it will feel; every time you do this, you are motivating them and leading them one step closer to believing it themselves. And every time they do these things on their own, they are leading themselves to do the same.
Proof and Logic
Our conscious mind responds to proof and logic. These can be in the form of: testimonials from other people, business plans that makes sense logically, income calculators, stories, positive group dynamics (it is easy to believe something will work when you are in a meeting of believers for two or three days), and training (understanding how something works helps the conscious mind believe). As leaders we can facilitate all of these, and we must.
As we discover along with our followers what our own core values are, and craft our visions around them, we learn to believe they are inevitable. Then we become one of those very fortunate top 5-percenters who already bathe in our abundance or are on the fast track to the bath house.
Consider, these questions:
If everyone you might ever prospect knew what you know about your opportunity, would they be at least interested? What percentage would be interested? (I say at least 50 percent.)
If you learned some of the most important things (feelings) MISSING in these people’s lives, and you showed them exactly how they could get them, what percentage of them would give it a go? (I say at least 50 percent of the 50 percent.)
That means 25 percent of everyone you now know, or will ever meet, will become new personally sponsored representatives. That is at least 50 to 100 new personally sponsored distributors a year. You only need to do that for a year or two to explode an empire that could create a lifetime of income for you.
Learn the motives that will propel YOU to lead with passion and power. Learn the motives of everyone you talk to about your opportunity. Develop the habit of teaching yourself and all of your people how to believe success is inevitable. And you and your team’s success will clock Mach II velocity.