HL February 5,13

To become successful, you need to be a value creator. Constantly create value for clients and recruits. Care deeply about them and own the outcomes you sell. Don't waste time, keep improving and growing. Each day is a new opportunity to start fresh and make better choices. Invest time in growing your awareness. Learn from past experiences and be better prepared for the future. Wipe the slate clean and focus on the present moment. Your future depends on what you do now. Keep growing and looking forward to tomorrow. Hey, good day, everybody. Hey, listen, I got a couple of different things I wanna share with you today I think gonna be helpful for you. First of all, is that in order for you to really become super successful, you have to become a value, value creator code. In other words, you have to create value for your potential clients and your potential recruits and your recruits. You've gotta constantly be creating value because if you're not creating value, people leave. They go somewhere else. If they're not experiencing getting what they need, right, from you, whether they're a client of yours or a recruiter, they're going to leave. They're gonna go somewhere else to find that thing, that value that they need. So the value creator code is I am a value creator. I make a difference for my recruits and my clients and I make a difference for my business. I'm worth working with. I'm worth doing business with because I know how to create value now and I'm an indefatigable, right, untiring, right, in my effort to develop my ability to create even more value in the future. I'm a force for positive change and positive results in every endeavor in which I invest my time and energy. I'm determined to produce results. I persevere where others crack and abandon their efforts. I take initiative and bring my recruits and clients valuable breakthrough generating ideas. When I don't have those ideas, I'm resourceful enough to go and find them. I care deeply about my clients and my recruits. This is a part of the value that I create. I own the outcomes that I sell. I make sure that I execute and that my clients and recruits achieve the better results they needed when they chose to use me, to go and business me or to buy from me. So question, what do you believe belongs on your value creator's code? Because folks, if you don't have a value code, you're never gonna become what you can become. So next thing, all right, wiping the slate clean. We're in the beginning of a new year, 2013. We're, you know, we're into February now but I just wanna talk about wiping the slate clean. You know, it's a funny thing. The way our little corner of the universe is organized. Each day, the Earth makes a complete revolution on its journey around the sun and us with it. Each morning when we wake up, the prior day is forever lost to us. It's almost as if by design, we were given the ability to call for a do-over, like somehow it's necessary. Every year at just this time, we complete another trip around the giant star in the center of our solar system. The year that we are leaving is also forever lost to us as we enter the new year. We're already a little over one month into the new year as I'm talking about this. So another opportunity to call for a do-over. The past is forever lost to us. The future is unknown. All we ever really have is this moment now. And what we do now, what we do in this moment is really gonna determine all our future moments. So whatever you're doing now, like you want your future to be better, right? In order for your future to be better, it's dependent on what you do right now. So if you waste that time, you don't prospect, you don't go on appointments, you don't recruit anybody, you don't do anything, you're not self-improving, you're not getting better, you're not growing your skill sets and your knowledge base, right? If you're not doing that, then your future present moments, right, your future right now's aren't gonna be any better. And you see people living their whole lives that way. They don't do anything in preparation for the future. And so their life just keeps going along the same all the time. It never gets better. Their incomes stay the same or they go backwards. They don't experience any of the joy of having enormous growth and feeling good about themselves and helping other people. And by the way, you can't help anybody else unless you're growing, unless you're doing better. There's nothing you can do to help somebody if you don't know what the heck it is you're doing. If you're not well-versed, well-trained, knowledgeable, have strong skill sets, there's no way to help another person. But we do step into that moment with all the knowledge and the experience we gained yesterday. So whatever happens, okay, you step into the day with all that knowledge that you've acquired. So if you haven't been working on yourself, you don't have any new knowledge, then you're just stuck. But if you've been working on yourself, so every day you step into a new day with all of the things you've learned and know, which can then help you to have better results. It's not gonna be perfect. You're not gonna have perfection, but you're gonna be in a better situation to get better results, make more money, grow your business, have more success. Look, we step into the new sunrise a little bit wiser, a little bit better prepared than we were the day before. But imagine if you really focused at every available moment you had that wasn't committed already, that you can use that time to grow yourself, to read something powerful to help you, to listen to an audio of someone that's done what you wanna do and knows what they're talking about, all right, or changing your thinking about what you're able to do, anything that grows you, right, or you're more aware because, look, the key to life, folks, the key to life, this life, is growing your awareness. The more aware we become in whatever it is we do and in life in general, the easier life gets. The people that struggle the most in life are the least aware people. Awareness is critical for you to change your life. You've got to grow your level of awareness. In other words, what I mean by that, if you're a 10-year-old, you have a certain level of awareness. Hopefully, by the time you're 30, you have a much better level of awareness. You wouldn't do the same things that a 10-year-old would do as a 30-year-old, hopefully, assuming you've grown and you've gotten better, smarter, whatever, right, more knowledge. You're gonna make better choices as a 30-year-old than as a 10-year-old, and hopefully, when you're a 40- or 50-year-old, you're gonna make a lot better choices than you would have when you were 30 because you've grown your level of awareness. What you wanna do is you're gonna accelerate that, so you wanna invest as much time and energy as possible in growing yourself, growing your awareness so that you can start every day making little bit better decisions, better actions, and have better results because of that. We do step into that moment with all the knowledge and experience we gained. Yes, like I said, we step into the new surprise a little bit wiser, a little bit better prepared than we were the day before. We greet the new horizon armed with all the knowledge, all the skillsets we've gained from our victories, the lessons and the scars from battles we've lost, and on the whole, we're a lot better prepared. We're better prepared to try again, right? Like let's say you got an appointment and you don't close that appointment because you didn't know what to say, but then you talk to your upliner, you listen to audio, and then you find out what you should have said, and so the next time you get in that same situation, you use the information that you've gained, the awareness that you've gained, and you next appointment like that, you close it, right? You know, that's why you should listen to my Overcoming Objections CD like 100 to 200 times so that you know what to say so you're better prepared so the next time that situation arises, you can get a better result, okay? We're better prepared to try something new. We're better prepared for the adventure that is tomorrow. That's what you wanna do. You wanna keep growing so that you look forward to tomorrow. You can't wait for that I wanna think about or I wanna talk to my agent or I don't have time or whatever the things that people throw at you, right? We're better prepared, and we're better prepared to wipe the slate clean and start over. Look, you can't carry your victory, so if you had a great month, you know, you can't carry that victory or the battle that you fought and won. You can't carry that forward because it's over with already. You can't carry your losses with you either. You can't refight those battles where you lost the sale, you lost the recruits. All you can carry into the future is the wisdom, the knowledge, the awareness that you gained from that prior episode, right? Look, you took on this small rock circling, you looked at this rock which were on Earth, right? Circling around a giant star in the center of the corner of the universe and all the relationships you developed on your journey, right? If you need to wipe the slate clean, wipe it clean. Tomorrow's a brand new day, folks, and the day after that's a brand new day, and you should be growing, right? And making it better so that the next days are better. Again, I'll say this one more time because it's so critical. Your life is made up. It's gonna be made up of all of the work you've done. Like today, you can only get the kinds of results today based on what you've learned and the information and the knowledge you've acquired from yesterday. But if there's no knowledge acquirement, right, if you will, if there's no new skill sets that you've developed, then today's gonna be pretty much like yesterday, which is really a big problem I see is you have so many agents that aren't growing, they're not working on themselves, they're up like not pounding on them about this because look, you've gotta talk about this like I do incessantly. You're not gonna get everyone to do it, but unless you're talking about it and focused on it like a laser, you're not gonna get anybody to do it. And the main reason I had so much success, folks, is I constantly pounded into my people that growing themselves, mastering how to overcome objections, mastering how to destroy cash value, mastering how to prospect, mastering how to set appointments, mastering how to close, how to overcome those objections that come up, mastering the products, mastering recruiting, mastering field training. And I was saying, you've gotta grow your skill sets in these areas so you can succeed. Did everybody do it? Of course not, but the ones that did became superstars, made big money. Rick Susie, Chris Howard, Gary McCrummon, George Verdugo, the Youngers, you know, Mark Rowles, Neil Gervine, all these people that have done incredible, right? Brandon Neal, Brendan Merton, these people have done that. You need to be that person. And then you need to build resilience, folks. You need to learn how to be tougher. Look, you're not gonna win big in business, in life, unless you're tough as nails. You have to have like the skin of a rhinoceros, okay? No matter what talent you're building, resilience is a big factor, perhaps the factor. And resilience is defined as the ability to recover from adversity, to know, to the rejection, to somebody not showing up to a meeting, to somebody not, you know, giving, you know, the dark house. Resilience is the ultimate killer app because it allows us to adapt, to learn, to turn setbacks into progress. Look, the mystery is where does it come from? How do you develop resilience, right? And perhaps most important, is it possible to teach it? Yes, you need to talk about it, though. You need to be tough. One of the things when I was field training people, I mean, we'd go on an appointment where we didn't close the transaction, right? Or we went to an appointment and there was a dark house. People would say, yeah, we'll be there. We get there and there's nobody home. The house is dark, right? I would be driving to the next appointment or back to the office with my recruit and I used to have this conversation with everybody every time this happened. I'd say, John, I'm so glad this happened tonight, right? Either the lost sale or the no show, right, the dark house. Because one of the things, one of the reasons I've had success is I'm just tough as nails. I don't let anything bother me. I just keep moving forward, right? I don't, this happens, no big deal. Tomorrow's another day, I'm gonna make, set up four appointments instead of two appointments. You know, I just don't ever let anything like that bother me, right? I say, you know what, John, most people are big wussies. They have one little negative thing happen, like a dark house or a no show or a chargeback or something like that, and the first thing they wanna do is they wanna quit. They wanna say, that's not for me or whatever. They just roll up and get in the fetal position. They tuck their tail between their legs and they feel sorry for themselves and they're just big old wussies, right, big pansies. I can't stand people like that. Those people make me sick. By the way, John, you're not like that, are you? I had that conversation with every single person I've field trained because I wanted to make sure they knew that that kind of stuff, if that blows you out, you're a loser, right? You are, you're a less than zero to me, right? I wanted people to be embarrassed to be a whiner, complainer, you know, little wussy because the reality in life, folks, if you're gonna win big, you gotta be tough as nails mentally, not physically. There's some 90 pound women that are tougher than any 300 pound linebacker, mentally. I mean mentally, you gotta be tough because in any business, and not just sales, but any business, there's setbacks, there's problems. I've got friends who have started businesses, raised millions of dollars and they went bankrupt. Good, close friends of mine that have done this. What do they do? They get back up on the horse and they try another thing. They don't say, oh, I guess I need to go get me a good job because, you know, it's just entrepreneurial things just not for me. They don't do that because they're tough. They don't expect everything to go perfectly. When has everything gone perfectly in your life so far? It never happens. Do you have a perfect marriage? Are your kids perfect? Were your parents perfect? Do we live in a perfect country? Do you work for a perfect company right now? No, there's no such thing. Things go wrong. It's not that things go wrong that's a problem, it's your resilience in response to the thing going wrong. Look, one useful way to think about resilience is to think of it as a skill of controlling your emotions in negative situations, that's all it is. In this view, negative emotions are hot. They cause the brain to spark and short circuit. They cause performance and confidence to dissolve in a cascade of doubt and judgment. That's what happens. Oh, I don't know if I could do this. I don't know if I'm cut him out for this. Oh, this business is not as easy as they told me it is, right? Or whatever. Look, resilience is a skill of cooling those hot emotions and reinterpreting them, right, the setbacks in a positive future-oriented life. Like when I would have somebody that would say no that couldn't close them, my thought about it was, okay, I need to get better at overcoming that area of concern. I need to make sure I have better information, more information, more clarity with how I present this so that the next person doesn't say no to me. I never said, oh, these people are idiots or I'm not cut out for this. I always looked at every time things didn't go as I'd like or things weren't going as I'd like. My response was always, Hector, you've got to get better. I didn't blame it on my upline or my spouse or my kids or my ethnicity or my gender or anything. My response to setbacks, to things not going well, was always, Hector, you've got to get better so you can get better results. If you don't get better, you're not gonna get better results. So then what did I do? I took action on growing the things I knew, right, and growing my skill sets. I didn't feel sorry for myself. I didn't say, poor me, poor pitiful me, everything always bad happens to me. I didn't look at it that way. That's a loser mentality. You look at how do I need to change, what do I need to do to become a better closer, a better recruiter, a better leader, a better trainer, a better whatever you need to become better at, okay? You know what you're weak at. Get your butt to work and start growing yourself in that area so that that weakness becomes a strength. Your goal should be to turn every current weakness into a strength, and the more focused you are on that, the harder you work on it, the more energy you expend on that, the faster it'll happen. Look, we normally think of resilience as a response. The surprising thing about resilience, however, is that the most important moment comes before the negative event. It's pre-sillience, a new word, pre-sillience. Studies show that resilient people start controlling their emotions before the stressful event begins. In other words, resilient brains function sort of like smart thermostats. Even before the emotional heat arrives, they provide an anticipatory burst of cool, calm control. One of the things that I always did, you needed, I say, you need to determine how you're gonna react to no, I'm not interested, that's not for me, you know, whatever, a dark house, anything that you perceive as being negative, you need to decide before it happens how you're gonna respond to that, okay? If I, my response in advance to a dark house was I'm gonna overbook, I'm gonna set, instead of having two points, I'm gonna set four appointments. If somebody doesn't show up like that, I'm gonna have a backup. Check out this study about Navy SEALs who were found to anticipate negative events by activating their emotional control centers. In other words, before they encounter the negative event, right, and if you're a Navy SEAL, there's lots of negative events, that's their whole life, right? Their brains are already in a calmed down mode so they can be calm when that happens, they don't panic. They don't go, oh my God, what am I gonna do? What's gonna happen, I'm gonna die. They're not doing that, they're thinking rationally. They're thinking because they're calm. They're thinking about how do I rectify this situation? The other interesting thing is that it seems this ability can be grown through practice. For instance, professional musicians who are preparing for a major performance, this is also actors, you know, will often pre-create as closely as possible the performance conditions right down to the time of day, the clothes they'll wear and the chair they'll use. This is one of the things I talk about with these professional golfers that I work with. You need to have a visual. You need to have an imagination and imagine every single thing that's gonna take place in your round before it happens. If you play the golf course, you know exactly where you wanna hit your tee shot. You know exactly, you know, based on where the pin is, where you wanna land that shot. You wanna, when you're gonna go into putt, you wanna visualize the line and see if it has a slight break to it. You wanna visualize that whole thing before it happens going in that direction. So, that's what you've gotta do, right? The interesting thing is, folks, you can grow this through practice. NFL kickers like Billy Cutoff of the Ravens who uses biofeedback devices that help teach them to regulate their stress levels in pressure situations, right, this is why the more prepared you are, you get in a situation where a client's throwing you a bunch of negatives, right, or objections. If you aren't prepared for that and you get panicked, you're gonna blow it. But if you're prepared for that, if you listen to my Overcoming Objections tape, 100, 200 times, you're gonna go, boom, got that, easy. Easy peasy, don't worry, you know exactly what to say, how to react to that, and you can keep moving forward. But if you don't know what to say, you're not prepared, you're gonna stumble, you're gonna get nervous, you're gonna blow it, they're gonna see that you're not confident and nervous, and they're not gonna buy from you or they're not gonna join, okay? Then there's a wonderful example of Susan Cain, an introvert and author of Quiet the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, who had to face her worst fear, which is giving a speech in front of a huge audience. A lot of you that are just getting involved, you're going, oh my God, I can't ever get up in front of a room of, you know, whatever number of people and speak. I mean, I can't do that, I'm scared to death of that, so I'm gonna quit. Long story short, she got coached, did nothing but rehearse for a solid week, right, she rehearsed it, and then she nailed it. Folks, I tell you, when I first got started, the very first FAFSA that I ever went to, I was asked to speak to do like, you know, five or 10 minutes, and I wrote my entire talk down on legal pad, and I was so nervous. I was sweating, my eye was twitching, you know, I mean, I was nervous like you cannot believe, okay? And I started doing my talk and I was so bad, I was like, you know, like reading the wrong lines and doing everything wrong, I sucked so bad. My wife is in the audience, Jan, she says, I'm never coming to a meeting where you're speaking again, that was, you embarrassed me to no end, right? I had 12 new people there, I recruited every single person that day, everyone. I recruited 12 people in one day in my team. And the reason is is because they all thought, my God, if he can do it, if Hector can do it as bad as he is, I could definitely do this, because I was already having success, I was making sales, making money and all that, but I couldn't speak, it scared me to death. But my reaction to that wasn't, I'm not cut out for this, I can't do this, I'm gonna quit, my reaction was, I need to do this more, I need to practice, drill, rehearse more, I need to get better so that, you know, I can't stay this bad, if I just keep working on it, eventually, I'm gonna get to the point where I'm decent at and hopefully someday I'll get good at it, but if I don't work at it, if I don't practice, drill, rehearse, if I don't do more of these, I'm never gonna get there. And so that was my reaction to what at the time, when I was doing it, I was like, you know, worried about what people were thinking of me, it was a disaster, it really wasn't a disaster. It didn't end up being a disaster, okay? And I looked at it the right way, I had right thinking about that situation, and that's how you have to look at everything in your life. Look, they're all being, all these people, right? Athletes, musicians, actors, they're all being resilient, creating the pressurized situation over and over, right, in their mind, to teach their brain to calm down at the right moments, and this way of thinking, practicing resilience is not that different from practicing a golf swing. Here are the keys, there's three keys. One, you pre-create the stressful situation in your mind, you redo it over and over in your mind, you play it over, you kind of, what are they gonna say, this is what I'm gonna say, and you do it over and over so that when it actually happens, you know exactly what to do, right? You're not nervous, you might still be nervous, but you're not so nervous you can't perform. It's not enough to imagine it vaguely, you gotta get every detail, every single detail. Ideally, duplicate the atmosphere, if not, imagine it as vividly as possible. A golfer, a musician might imagine the uneasily rusting of the crowd, the wind, lots of different things, okay? A CEO might imagine the hush of an expected boardroom, right, where everybody's eyes on you, they're expecting you to say something profound and inspiring or whatever, and you know, you've gotta go, I've experienced that myself countless times going in, right? Speaking in the convention, for example, when there's like 50,000 people in the room, and you got 10 minutes or 15 minutes, right, and you gotta do it, right? And I'm nervous, who wouldn't be nervous in that situation, but you're prepared. I go over and over and over and over and over what I'm gonna talk about to the point where I've already done the talk 25 times, so when I get in there, even though I'm nervous, right, I've done it so much, I know exactly what I'm gonna say and exactly what I'm doing, I just do it, right? And after the first couple of sentences, then I'm going, I'm on, right, I'm doing it. Look, number two, no stopping allowed. Once the performance starts, you can't give yourself an exit door. You need to endure it and completely get to the other side of it. You can't stop. And number three, repeat, then repeat it again. Like I just said, 25 times, I don't know, as many times as you need to get where it's reflexive. And again, learning to endure and control spikes of intense emotion is like enduring any sort of stimulus. Time and repetition are your best friends. This is a very good thing. Time and repetition are your best friends, folks. Tear it up, talk to you next week.