deborah.nu - the network marketing training resource for people
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"Do Not Set Yourself Up For Failure"
Despite all possible precautions and preparations, life will always be full of temporary defeats. A key foundational belief you must cultivate in order to persevere in any undertaking is that FAILURE IS ALWAYS TEMPORARY. Only success has any permanence. Moreover, the only way to fail in this business is to quit. The following is a collection of attitude adjusting suggestions and illustrative anecdotes that can help you maintain a more accurate perspective on success and failure in this business.
A common error distributors make is to compare their level of achievement to that of someone else in the business. Such comparisons can be very misleading and potentially damaging. For example, lets say a new distributor begins part time, committing 5 to 10 hours a week. This distributor attends an event and hears of another distributor who has been in the business the same length of time but has had far more success. This leads to lots of worries and doubts. "I must be doing something wrong, or maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was. Why am I not more productive?" What the distributor doesn't know is that the other person is working 40 hours a week in the business and has a spouse that is also working 40 hours a week in the business. How could a person working 5 to 10 hours a week have the same level of success as two people who work a total of 80 hours a week? In golf one competes against the course and oneself not against other players. This is a good way to look at our business. If you want to know how you are doing, compare your progress to the commitment you made and the plan you established at your early training/planning sessions. Then, and only then, can you make valid conclusions about your progress and make necessary adjustments to your work activities, timeline or goals.
One of the biggest challenges faced by every distributor or executive every day is rejection. We assume that if everyone knew what we know they would be as excited as we are, and would want to join this business with us. Unfortunately, people often say "No" despite all the great information we give them. Taking these rejections personally leads to all sorts of fears, doubts and worries.
The truth is that this business is not for everyone; no matter how good we are at it we will usually get more nos than yeses. In fact, one of the few quantifiable differences between the poor performer in our business and the most successful Team Elite member is that the Team Elite Member has heard a lot more Nos. The best way to understand and handle rejection in this business is to take a lesson from the waiter serving coffee in a restaurant. If five or ten customers in a row all refuse a second cup of coffee the waiter does not quit his job because he can't stand the rejection. Nor does he worry that there is something wrong with himself or the coffee. He realizes that, for whatever reason, some people just don't want any coffee and goes on to serve those customers who do want some. Another way to properly look at rejection is to prospect like a gold miner. The gold miner has to dig a lot of dirt for every nugget of gold he finds. But he doesn't mind because it is the gold he is looking for. He simply pushes the dirt aside and goes on looking for more gold.
Akin to the rejection problem is the issue of no shows. No shows are people with whom you set an appointment or invite to an event who say they are coming but never appear. Many members of Team Elite have personal stories of inviting a crowd of people to their home, rearranging the furniture to accommodate the expected guests, baking dozens of cookies and brewing gallons of coffee to serve them and then having nobody or maybe only one person show up.
Such an event can be devastating to a new distributor. To those of us who have been in the business for any length of time, however, such "catastrophes" are common enough that they seem to be darkly humorous, but necessary, rights of passage or initiations into the realities of the business that must be overcome by those wishing to achieve high levels of success. In situations where you have a lot of people invited to an event it is usually best to keep attendance expectations low. This way, if there are a lot of no shows, you will not be disappointed and you leave open a chance to be pleasantly surprised.
Here is another related example of how a warped perspective can help things go wrong. A new distributor in the business started out very strong. He planned an opportunity presentation for 30 people but soon the responses to his efforts led him to expect 80 and then 200. He kept working hard to good effect, and by the last week before his meeting he was expecting between 800 and 1000 people to show up. Against his upline's repeated advice, as his expectations rose, he changed the venue for his meeting several times, finally settling on the local convention hall that could accommodate up to 2000 people. On the appointed night, 150 people showed up for the presentation. At that time this was the largest meeting and the largest group of prospects that had ever been gathered in the company's history -- a towering success. Unfortunately, seeing a crowd of 150 in a room big enough for 2000 and having held expectations of nearly 1000 attendees, the distributor saw this astonishing success as a devastating humiliation and a crushing defeat and quit the business.
The leaders in Deborah.nu have made most of these mistakes, encountered and overcome almost every conceivable challenge or set back, and have endured through almost every form of rejection in building this business. The way they have overcome such adversities is the same way you can. Keep it all in perspective. Cultivate the moral courage to accept constructive criticism from your upline (be coachable) and a sense of humor about the business. Remember, each challenge or perceived failure is always a good opportunity to laugh and learn, in addition to bringing you one step closer to success.
So, laugh, learn, and get on with it!
Your Deborah.nu Staff
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