HL November 13,12

The transcription is about the importance of vocabulary and how it can transform your life. It emphasizes that words have power and that managing your thinking is critical to managing your life. It also discusses how politicians use words to influence people's thinking and how improving your vocabulary can improve your ability to communicate and be successful. The speaker encourages reading as a way to improve vocabulary and gain knowledge. Additionally, the speaker mentions the statistic that 90% of salespeople never read books on sales, highlighting the importance of continuous learning. Overall, the message is that improving your vocabulary can lead to personal and professional success. Hey, good day, everybody. Here's another great thing by that John Hawkins I mentioned this week. You'll see some really fantastic things that I'd like to share with you that I think could be helpful. This one is called Five Ways to Transform Your Life Just by Changing Your Vocabulary. It says, vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by. Yes, by it. As names have power, words have power. Patrick Rothfuss. So those are one of the things that I've experienced in my life is I'm a reader. I'm a voracious reader. I've always been a reader. And I know that one of the things that has helped me dramatically in my business life is having a decent vocabulary. And what that allows you to do, it allows you to be able to communicate more effectively. And effective communication, folks, is everything in a people business like we're in. He says, just as the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon, your thoughts have shaped your life. I talk about this all the time incessantly. Your thoughts have shaped your life. Just as the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon, your thoughts have shaped your life. According to the National Science Foundation, we have as many as 50,000 thoughts per day. Many of them are basic. Step, grab, that, move. But there are also many repeating messages. These ideas matter more than most realize because just as our beliefs and actions impact the words we use, the words we use shape our beliefs and our actions. This is why it's so important managing your thinking. Managing your thinking is critical. If you do not learn how to manage your thinking, you can never really manage your life. Because your thinking leads to behavior. Whichever you think about is what you behave on. And what you behave on, whatever you act on, creates a result, which is your life. But everything begins with what you're thinking about. There's no thing, I mean, even as you're listening to this, I don't know, you're on a cell phone, you're on a phone in your home, you're in your home, you're in a car, you're in a building, I don't know where you are, it doesn't matter where you are when you're listening to this. But the reality that everything around us, everything in our lives, everything that's been created and will be created, folks, it starts with somebody's thought about that thing, whatever it is. The telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, the light bulb, Thomas Edison, the iPhone is Steve Jobs, right? I mean, it doesn't matter what it is. Everything starts with a thought. There's no thing that doesn't start with a thought. Everything does. Every single thing. If you're objective and honest, you know that every one of your thoughts has brought you, has put you in the place you are right now, wherever you are. If things are going great, guess what? You have some pretty good thinking. If things are going crappy, guess what? You have some pretty stinking thinking probably, right? You don't even realize it. You're probably not even aware of it. But it doesn't matter if you are or not, it's still the truth. The truth is managing your thinking is critical to managing your life, to creating the life you want. This principle is well understood at the highest level of politics. Politicians know that if they can get you to accept their choice of words, they can probably get you to accept their way of thinking as well, right? We just had an election last week. It doesn't matter who won the election. But I guarantee you, whoever won the election, it was their choice of words that created that. Whether you think of yourself as pro-life or pro-choice on abortion, or you view illegal aliens as illegals or undocumented immigrants, or regard tax cuts as giving people back their own money as opposed to giving a tax break to the rich, likely determines which way you fall on the issue. When the words change, the feelings tend to change too. So the way that you look at something, the way you label something, it determines what you think about that thing, it determines what you do about that thing too, and it determines, like this case, who you vote for. So it's always what you're thinking that creates your life, your reality, your circumstance. Always, always. The good news with that is if you can improve your thinking, if you can work on having right thinking, in other words, thinking that leads to the kind of results that you want, you study people that are having what you want, and you study what they think like, and then what they act like, and then you mimic and model that, then you can have similar, maybe even better results. So this is also true of your ability to communicate through words, right, because they determine if you recruit somebody or sell something to somebody, if you improve your vocabulary, it determines what people think of you, and whether they're gonna take you seriously or not take you seriously, right? How you speak, which is determined by your vocabulary, determines how people perceive you, whether you're the kind of person that they want to do business with, or they want to follow. That's why it's so critical that you read a lot. I think reading a lot is such an important thing because the mere fact of reading a lot, it improves your vocabulary. It improves your ability to communicate. I think one of the most important things that you can do for your children is to get them reading. And you know what I did with my kids, both my kids are voracious readers, okay? Both of them are. They're both different fields. One's in finance and one's in the movie business, okay? But they're both voracious readers. And the way that Jan and I got them to do that is when they were little, when they first started to read, when they were like five or six years old and they started the process of learning how to read, we started to say, okay, for every book you read and you do a book report, I want you to do a little book report for me. When you read the book, if you do a book report, we'll give you $5. Well, $5 back then was a lot of money, okay? So yeah, I bribed them into doing it, absolutely, because when they were little, I wanted them to get excited about reading. I wanted them to read, because I knew even then the impact reading had in my own life, okay? Because I used to be a library rat. When I grew up, when I was eight, nine, 10 years old, I used to, you know, all the way till today, I lived at the library. I used to go there in the summertime, especially when it was hot. I'd spend all day in the library, reading everything I could get my hands on, autobiographies, boy's life, you name it, okay? And then later on, you know, as I grew older, I started reading different things, right? And when I got into business, I have this, I'm a reader, I love to read, so I started reading everything I could get my hands on relative to success, relative to people who were successful. Everything, I read everything. I probably, over the last, you know, over my lifetime, I'm sure I've read 1,500 books or more, I don't know, a lot. I've read a lot of stuff, and I do, I have a Kindle now, thank God for Kindles. One of the great things about a Kindle is you can have, you know, hundreds of books on your thing. You can have it at your disposal and read it anywhere you want. The other great thing about a Kindle, to expand your vocabulary, is it has a dictionary. So if you're reading on a Kindle, you get a Kindle for $89, it's ridiculous, okay? But on a Kindle, anytime you come upon a word that you don't, you're not sure of the definition of what it really means, you just click on it, and it tells you what the definition is, and then you can expand your vocabulary. You know, one of the things I used to do is I used to read and look at, you know, Reader's Digest. I used to love Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest always had a thing on vocabulary, right? Learning words, and I think that's critical. And if you haven't, if you say, well, I don't really like to read, I'm not a reader, well, you know what, you need to change that. You need to get more information. You need to have more knowledge. You need to get more expertise. You need to read more. Everybody, there's no, it's not like, it's not like now that you're, you know what I just heard the other day, a statistic? 90% of salespeople, 90%, nine out of 10 salespeople, never read any books on sales. Can you believe that? Could you believe a person could be in sales, and 90% of them don't ever read a book on how to become better at sales? Do they not get the correlation between studying that and becoming better at sales and making more money and becoming more successful? I mean, come on, there's so many different things. You look at whatever your weaknesses are right now. I promise you, there's multiple books, sometimes hundreds of books, written on every topic relative to success, whether it's time management or sales or people skills or whatever, okay? There is an enormous amount of information. Just go to Amazon, right? You think of the subject you want, put in the subject you want to learn about, boom, I guarantee you there's tons and tons of books on that subject. There is no way, if you're serious about being successful, that you can deny having a better vocabulary wouldn't help it. It's gonna help it, I promise you. You will be shocked and amazed because in the sales business, we're in the sales business, in the sales business, your ability to effectively communicate, to sway people from where they are over to your way of thinking, to your ideas, is the determining factor whether you're gonna recruit or sell anybody. So you need to start doing that. Look, folks, all it's gonna do is help you become more successful, make more money, build a better business, have a better future, provide more for your family. That's all it's gonna do. If that's not important to you, then don't do it. Okay, number one, controlling your temper. Look, if you're a human being, you've gotten into arguments with other people. It just goes with the territory, but how you describe that argument, with words, right, how do you describe that argument can change how you view it. Was it a knock-down, drag-out fight or a minor disagreement? Did you fly off the handle or did you get into kerfuffle? Show me someone who can't control their temper and I'll show you someone who habitually uses words like enraged, explosive, furious to describe their feelings when someone with a better self-control would use words like perturbed, peeved, mildly annoyed. If, for example, you label your reaction as mildly annoyed, it's difficult to justify screaming or being upset for hours, isn't it? By changing the words you habitually use, you can eventually turn yourself from a raging wolverine into a lamb. Look, one of the things that I've always used as a guideline is to never talk to someone that I'm upset with, right, that I'm perturbed by, right, until I've calmed down, until I've thought through everything I was gonna say before I talked to them. I would never, ever talk to somebody when I'm upset with them. I would always wait, because, you know, I'm a human being. I might, somebody might do something, you say something, it gets me a little peeved, right? And so, but I'm very careful not to say anything right then. Now, you might feel better to yell at them or make them feel bad or, you know, do whatever, but I think that's a mistake. And I don't think, I know it's a mistake, because once you start saying stuff when you're angry, you can never take those things back and they last. And that's the surest way to destroy a relationship. And you know what? You can't be successful in our business without developing healthy relationships. And when you get angry and you speak out in anger, there's a very high probability you're gonna ruin and destroy, or at least hurt, tragically, that relationship. So my advice to you is before you ever talk to somebody when you're upset with them, that you calm down and you think through exactly what you're gonna say, rehearse it, so that when you talk to them, right, you don't destroy the relationship. You don't attack the person. You talk about the behavior, not them as a human being. That will help you in building a primary commitment. Like, you can't, I have a lot of people in my RVPs over the years where they have people that they fight with. Imagine you're fighting with your own people in your business, the very people that can help you become more successful that you earn overrides on when they do something, that you fight with them. So, that's idiotic, folks, that you would ever fight with somebody that is in your business. Now, you may disagree with them, and that's fine, but when you talk to them, you have to talk to them in a way that doesn't attack them as a human being, right, but you talk about the behavior. You have to learn how to control your behavior, right, and what you say to people. It's critical in order to build a great business. You gotta control that temper of yours. Number two, improving your self-esteem. Look, there are a few things that, there are a few things that are more frustrating than talking to a really nice person who's intelligent, who's charming, who believes that they're worthless. You know, you've already had people like that. They're really great people, but they don't see themselves as being great. They see themselves as being less than. Explaining how ridiculous that is generally doesn't work because when you tell someone who thinks that they're a loser, right, that they're actually an amazing person, they either think you're trying to make them feel better or they think you're trying to take advantage of them or that there must be something wrong with you too. Look, there are a variety of causes for low self-esteem, but you almost always find it reinforced by the language the person uses about themself. Like, ah, I'm such a loser. I'm so dumb. Why am I so stupid? Why do I always do stupid things? You know, why does this always happen to me? Why can't I do anything right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Look, it's terrible to hear another human being talking about themselves in that way, in a way that could make them wanna punch someone else in the mouth if that person said it about them. You imagine if you had somebody tell you to your face the things that you say to yourself sometimes, you'd probably wanna punch them, right, or at least lash out at them. Look, this is why it's so important not to put yourself down. Stop putting yourself down. Yes, you're not perfect. Who's perfect? There's nobody that's perfect. A person died a couple thousand years ago, okay? There's no one perfect. You're not dumb. You may have been a little off your game, maybe. You're not stupid. Maybe you said something a little dumb. You're not a failure. You just made a mistake. It happens to everyone sometimes. Even if you don't believe it, change your language for a long enough period of time and your thinking will naturally gradually start to change along with it. Look, folks, I make a mistake. It doesn't mean I'm an idiot, I'm dumb, or I'm a bad person. It means I made a mistake. Why'd I make the mistake? Because I had a low level of awareness like I talked about last week, right? Low level of awareness. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. There's nobody here on this planet who has not made a mistake, who has not made multiple mistakes. So don't beat yourself up, folks. Look, staying focused on your business. Look, the difference between good producers and great ones is often that the great ones are able to stay productive even when they don't feel like it. This is a huge thing. Even when they don't feel like it, it's really important. It's really important that you keep going, that you stay with it, that you stay on top of it, all right? Even when you're not feeling like you want to do that. So critical, it's so critical that you do that. Stay focused. When the good worker's eyes begin to glaze over and they're taking a break to go chat at the water cooler, the great workers stay on task. Same thing in our business. When people are screwing off, they're doing stuff to try to kill time instead of prospecting, instead of making phone calls, instead of working on their F&A for that night, instead of working on and putting together a great meeting for tomorrow or whatever, right? Great workers stay on task. They stay after it. Great producers stay on task. A lot of that comes from the different messages they're giving themselves. Like, is it, I'm tired, I'm really leaving it all on the table? Is it, I could really use a break, or is it, all right, now it's really time to push? Is it, I wish I could do something else, I wish I didn't have to recruit and prospect and all that, or is it, I love pushing myself to the limit? Look, saying those things once or twice probably won't have much of an impact, but when they become your habitual response, it'll turn you into a workhorse who can keep trotting long after everyone else has been rode hard and put away wet, okay? So how you talk to yourself is so critical to where you end up, because how you talk to yourself, what it does, it exposes what you're thinking, and what you're thinking leads to behavior, and your behavior leads to results. So it's, again, coming back to what I talked about before, your thinking is, managing your thinking is probably the most critical thing you have to do in your life, really, in terms of being successful. You've got to learn to do that. Look, dealing with bad news. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, into each life some rain must fall. Look, we all get bad news, folks. So the question isn't whether bad things are going to happen to good people. The question is, how are you going to describe it? Is it a nightmare, or a minor inconvenience? Is it a disaster, or a learning experience? A train wreck, or an issue we need to handle? Look, your language, inner and outer, right? The things you think about, which is your inner language, and the outer, the things you actually speak, they're gonna determine how and where you end up in your life, they just are. And if you really think about what I'm saying here, if you really look back, and you think about what you think about, and what you do, you're gonna see why you are where you are. I'm telling you, it's that inner and outer language that always determines how and where we end up. So you've got to learn how to manage both of them, what you're thinking about, and what you say, and because what you say is always what you're thinking about. So you really, it starts with your inner thoughts. Your inner thoughts determine it all. What difference does it make? Well, you could spend hours obsessing over a nightmare. Would you, this is a better question, would you spend hours obsessing over a nightmare? Would you cry yourself to sleep over it? Could you see yourself screaming at someone for causing a nightmare in your life? Now ask yourself the same question about a minor inconvenience. You get different answers, right? Could you see yourself screaming at someone for a minor inconvenience in your life? No. You get different answers. Now ponder the fact that in many cases, one person's nightmare is another person's minor inconvenience because of the way they think. Highly productive people often handle several problems per day that less adept people choke on. A big part of the reason they can do that is they don't turn an issue we'll need to handle into a train wreck by mislabeling it in their heads by overreacting again. Number five, diffusing difficult situations. Look, I used to do, this is what he's saying here, I used to do internet technical support and was very good at it. In fact, I was the guy they gave the screaming out of control customers the other techs couldn't or wouldn't handle. The reason, I knew exactly what I was doing, fairly good at what he did, and he maintained a calm demeanor. But I also knew how to de-escalate tension with language. A typical conversation in one of those cases might go something like this. Customer, I'm sick and tired of your company's bull, you know what, you guys are a-holes. This is John Hawkins' response to that. It sounds like you're having a frustrating experience. Tell me what's been happening. Can you see how making that comment would diffuse that? It sounds like you're having a really frustrating experience. Can you tell me what's been happening? Customer, well, I talked to this dumb so-and-so who said blah, blah, blah, blah. John Hawkins, wow, I'd really be upset if that happened to me too. But the good news is I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm very thorough. So after we get done, we'll know exactly what's going on. And I promise you we're gonna resolve your situation. Customer, well, okay, what do we need to do? So just the way, see, if he would've got confrontational with this person, if he would've started arguing back because he got upset and he took it personally, well, that would destroy the whole thing. That would lose a customer. This person is upset because something happened and he's taking it out on him. The guy doesn't have anything to do with this thing, but he knows that it's not really at him. It's really at the situation. Even in Primerica, I would have people say, oh, I talked to a Primerica person. They did this and that. Or I got involved in Primerica and then that person wasn't very good. They did this and that. And I'd say, you know what? I'm really sorry to hear that. If I were you, I would've done the same thing you did. But let me just tell you something different, okay? I'm a different person and the way I handle things is completely different. And I know that whatever issue you might've had you won't have with me, I guarantee that. Why don't you tell me a little bit about what happened and so I can tell you what I would've done in that same situation. That's a better way to handle that when you have a person like that, right? He said, what I was doing there is called controlling the frame. When two frames meet, right, the stronger one wins. If a calm person starts talking to someone who's screaming, then soon thereafter, both of them will be screaming or calm. Depends on who wins, right? Depends on who bites. He says, this is because we have a natural tendency to get in sync with the people we're talking to and whoever's more firmly rooted in their frame tends to draw the other person into it. So the more calm you are and the more prepared you are, the more open you are, the less emotional you are, you're gonna draw that person into your frame, okay? Part of that is emotional, but it also depends on words you use. If you wanna make someone more excited, you use exciting language. If you want someone to be more placid, you use more serene language. Be the one guiding where the conversation goes emotionally with your vocabulary instead of drifting along like a jellyfish, okay? So those are really great things, folks. I mean, these are awesome things. Controlling your temper, improving your self-image, staying focused on your business, dealing with how do you deal with bad news and diffusing difficult situations. These are things that have so much value in our business and learning how to do that is so critical to where you end up. I wanna encourage you just to work like crazy, okay, on yourself. All the things I'm talking about are really just things that we can all do to improve us so that we can be more effective, so that we can get people, right, over to our way of thinking. We have a good way of thinking. In Prime America, we offer good for people, but you still need to be adept at being able to articulate what those things are, and sometimes you run into difficult people. It's gonna happen, all right? It's gonna happen. But it doesn't have to be the end. It could be the beginning of something great, right? Because look, like what John did with that one client right there. How's that client gonna feel now about this company? Yeah, he has a problem, but when people have a problem, all they really want is a solution, right? They don't want excuses. They don't want you to blame somebody else. They want you to fix it. And if you fix it, if you make it good, they'll want to continue to do business with you. Not only that, they're gonna want to send you more people because you handle it. Nobody expects everything. Well, some people do, but the vast majority, if you don't expect everything to be perfect, they expect to get issues resolved if something goes wrong. That's what they expect. Talk to you next week.