HL March 12,13

In this transcription, the speaker discusses how to overcome your worst enemies, which are fear and procrastination. The speaker emphasizes the importance of taking action despite fear and preparing thoroughly to boost confidence. They also highlight how procrastination is fueled by fear and leads to a mediocre life. To overcome procrastination, the speaker suggests adopting a "do-it-now" attitude and focusing on doing the most productive thing possible at every given moment. By overcoming fear and procrastination, one can achieve success in business and life. Hey, good day everybody. Hey listen, this is really great stuff today. Another more stuff from Anthony Iannarino, I think that's how you say his name. It's just stuff so really fantastic and it just coincides so great with what we do and being in the sales, recruiting, building, personal development business. It's just excellent stuff. So today's title is How to Beat Your Worst Enemies and this is just some great stuff. Look, your worst enemies are right now conspiring against you. It's true. They are out to get you. Worse still, there are more of them than there are of you. You are outnumbered and you are outgunned. You can defeat your worst enemies, but it won't be easy. What's the first one? It's fear. The leader of all the enemies you face is fear. It's a terrible foe too. It can steal your breath and paralyze you. The leader you stand can frighten you with the unknown and with uncertainty. He can plant disempowering thoughts and beliefs so deeply in your mind that they grow roots and hold for a lifetime. This is why so many people struggle so long. They are afraid of everything, everybody. They are afraid of what might happen. They are afraid of what already happened. They are just living in fear. A lot of adults are in that situation right now. A lot of you listening to this right now, fear is the number one thing holding you back from creating the business and the life you've always dreamed of. The fear isn't real. It's only a small but sometimes powerful part of your imagination. Fear is all about your imagination. As you've heard over and over, fear stands for false evidence appearing real. That's true. Most of the things that we fear never come to pass. What they do in the meantime is prevent you from taking action. The way you beat fear is by taking action in spite of being afraid. In spite of being afraid, you do it anyways. Once you've taken the action you fear, you've beaten it. This is really important. In building my business, I was always afraid of what people thought about me. I was afraid of getting rejected, which is really all of you listening. Those of you who aren't doing well, who haven't done as well as you'd like, I guarantee those fears, the fear of being rejected, and the fear of looking dumb maybe, or whatever thing you conjured up in your mind, imagined in your mind. How I overcame it, one, is I over-prepared. I prepared like crazy. One of the reasons you're afraid is because your level of preparation is so low. Subconsciously, you know you're not prepared. You know when you're not prepared, you're not going to get good results. It's kind of like when you go into a test when you were in school, and you went into a test and you know you weren't prepared. You know you didn't study, or you studied at the last minute, so you don't have any self-confidence. You go into that thing just hoping things would turn out right because you know you haven't prepared. A lot of the fear that you have in our business, in the sales business, in the recruiting business, in the leadership training business that we're in, is really a result of being unprepared. One thing I want to reiterate to you for the 10,000th time is you've got to prepare, and I believe you need to over-prepare. You need to prepare like your life, your financial life depends on it because it does. So what I did is I prepared. The one thing I thought, you know, how did I get myself to prospect like I needed to prospect to succeed at the level I've succeeded? How did I get myself to finally set those appointments with those scary people that I was afraid of setting appointments with? How did I do that? What did I do? Well, this is what I did. What I focused on was the final result. So in my mind, I would imagine after I presented, after I showed them why they should go ahead and do business or why I showed them they should be involved in Primerica and I showed all the features and benefits and got them to see beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we offered either from a product standpoint or from an opportunity standpoint was fabulous, that was really great. And when they understood it like I understood it or understand it, that they would be excited about it just like I'm excited about it. So the key was always getting them to understand it and see it the way that I saw it, which means you need to be able to articulate exactly what it is we do, how we do it, and why it makes sense versus what they're doing right now and how it could add to what they're doing right now. So by focusing on the outcome, by focusing on what I could see in my mind's eye was going to happen and how they were going to feel about me and how they're going to feel about my opportunity and how they're going to feel about our financial needs analysis and all that and how they would feel about me after they followed my advice and they started getting the kinds of results like getting out of debt, saving money, things start moving in the right direction for them, right? They're moving towards their financial objectives whether they're from the business standpoint or as a client standpoint. I would visualize what they would think about me after the appointment was done, not before, because after the appointment they would know the whole story. They would understand that this is really fantastic, that we have a great company, we have great products, our F&A is a phenomenal tool, that they would see all this stuff. They could see their compensation was just fabulous and that we had an opportunity that would allow them to create wealth if they chose to. I thought about how they would feel about me after the meeting. That gave me confidence to be bold and to direct and to follow up and to be very persistent. If you really believed that everybody would be better off if they did business with you or if they joined your business, if you really in your heart of hearts with every fiber of your being believe that people would be better off following you, following your example, following the recommendations you would make, the solutions you would come up with, if you believed that people would be better off with you than without you, then you would be as bold as all get out. But the reality is most of you don't believe that. Well, one of the problems is if you haven't done your due diligence, you haven't studied what we do and why it's superior to what other companies are offering or nobody's been offering a financial needs analysis and all of the features and benefits that we're offering, whether it's from the product standpoint or the opportunity and recruiting standpoint, when you understand all that's available to people and you get to that place where you believe that the average person is better off with you than without you, your level of boldness, your ability to follow up, to be persistent and to be direct with people in a positive professional way is going to go up. So that's how you're going to beat that fear is get to that place. The second thing is procrastination. One of the things that I've discovered is procrastination, it leads to a mediocre life. And fear doesn't come alone, folks. You know, fear almost always brings a partner and that partner is procrastination. When you're afraid of doing something, you procrastinate. Those of you who aren't prospecting because you're afraid, you don't do it, which means you procrastinate. You know, you have a tough call that you need to make and you want to call somebody that's kind of on your chicken list and you keep putting up, you procrastinate, right? Fear is what's causing the procrastination because you're afraid of the response, that you might get a no or you might get rejected, right? So fear, right, has a partner and that partner is procrastination. Well, you've got to be able to overcome, you have to overcome that fear so that you can overcome the procrastination. Because procrastination, folks, it builds on fear. The more fearful you are, the more you procrastinate. The more you procrastinate, right, whatever that thing you're afraid of grows. Since you're afraid of being judged, right, everybody's afraid of being judged. You're afraid of being hurt or rejected, right? That's really what you're, when the rejection is really you fearing being hurt, your feelings are going to get hurt, right, about who you are. You think if they reject your opportunity, they're rejecting you as a human being, as a person. But that's not what's happening. So you're afraid of that. You're afraid of failing. So what do you do? You don't even try. You don't even make an effort. You procrastinate. Procrastination, it lulls you into this false comfort of inaction. You feel better by procrastinating, right? You're feeling better because you're not facing the fear. So you feel like you're feeling better. But the problem is over time you feel worse. Look, procrastination whispers in your ear that there will be a time later. I'll get to it later. I'll call them later. I'll follow up later. I'll do this F&A and get prepared for the meeting later. Even though procrastination knows damn well that the time lost can never be regained. You can't recruit that time you lose. Look, the bottom line is this. In order for you to succeed on a grand scale, you have to adopt, you have to develop a do-it-now attitude. One of the things that I learned from Tom Hopkins early on when I used to study his things, and the saying was, do the most productive thing possible at every given moment. Let me repeat that. Do the most productive thing possible at every given moment. Imagine how much more successful you'd be over time in the next six months, a year, two years, three years, five years, if you actually did the most productive thing possible at every given moment. Every waking moment you always have a choice to do something with your time, your energy, with your thoughts. You always have a choice. If you chose to do the most productive thing possible at every given moment, your results will start to skyrocket. What are the most productive things? Prospecting, setting appointments, preparing to be successful, preparing and mastering all those seven fundamentals, doing the most productive thing possible at every given moment. For those of you who aren't where you want to be, if you adopted that mentality, which is what I did, I actually had a thing on my desk that said, do it now, and I had do the most productive thing possible written down on my visor in my car. I had it in my day timer. I would put it on my phone. I'd put it everywhere where you're constantly reminded, do the most productive thing possible at a given moment. One of the things that I did, and I've said this and I'll repeat it again, but I would check myself every hour. Let's say that now it's 10 o'clock in the morning, and an hour has passed from 9 o'clock. I'd ask myself, I'd say, Hector, what did you do to move you closer to your goal of building a great business, getting debt free, and financing independent? What did you do? I'd keep on recapping what I did in the previous hour. Sometimes I kind of didn't do anything, or I wasted time, or I wasn't as productive as I could be. I would check myself, because what I wanted to do, I didn't want to let one hour grow into two or three or five or a whole day where I didn't do anything. I wanted to always make sure, if I got off track even just a little bit, one hour is not going to kill you, but six or seven or eight hours is going to kill you. It's going to ruin a whole entire day. So if you can catch yourself and get back on track, make two or three calls, follow up, go drop by and see somebody, do some preparation for that next appointment, you have something that's going to move you closer to your goals and dreams. Over time, you do this every day. If you do it every waking moment, let's say you get up every morning at 7 a.m., and from 7 a.m. to midnight, you're checking yourself all day long. That may seem fanatical. But look, we're talking about becoming successful. We're talking about you accomplishing your goals. We're talking about you getting debt-free and financially independent. We're talking about you creating the life of your dreams. You're not going to do that acting like everybody else. You can't do what everybody else is doing and expect to create something special in your life. You're not going to create a great business or develop into a great leader or develop into a great recruiter or salesperson or whatever without doing that. Look, procrastination is a sweet-sounding but merciless adversary. Look, you temporarily feel better avoiding what you know you must do to succeed because of the discomfort it causes you. But long-term, you feel bad because you know you're not living up to your potential. You know you're not doing what you really need to do. Those of you hearing this call, you know this last week you didn't even come close to doing what you potentially could have done. You know it. You all know it. You know you could have made 10 more, 15, 30 more calls. You know you could have read a book instead of listening to the radio or instead of watching a TV program or a sporting event or went bowling or went and played softball or did whatever it is you do. You know you could have gotten way more done and you'd be that much closer to where you wanted to be. Look, you beat procrastination by pursuing meaningful, dream-fulfilling goals. And you know what those are. You need to write them down. You need to put them in writing. Every month you need to put your goals. Like right now, I sent a text to a bunch of different people yesterday and I asked them, you know, what are your goals for March? Did you put them in writing? Are they in writing? And are you vividly imagining those goals every day, right? I mean that's what I said to people because I know that people don't do that. They don't do that. In fact, I work with some PGA professional tour players and I sent them the same text and they're all playing in a tour event this week, right? And so not one of them had written down their goals for the week. They all did after I said it, but they didn't do it before and they hadn't really had a specific goal for the week. And so even people that are professionals that are at the highest level of their profession, if you will, right, they're not doing that. You need to do that. You need to write it down. What do you want to accomplish this week, this month, this six months, this year? Write it down, okay? Apathy. If procrastination doesn't get you, her brother apathy will try to soften you up. Apathy goes to work sapping you of your energy and your enthusiasm. You can't be passionate if you're tired, you're cynical, or you're pessimistic. While you're busy trying not to drink the Kool-Aid, apathy runs away with your goals. You know, a lot of people right now in Primerica, they're apathetic. If they're apathetic, they can't be passionate. They're tired. They have no energy. They're cynical. They're looking at everything that's wrong with Primerica. Look, Primerica's not a perfect business. There is no such thing as a perfect business, a perfect life, a perfect car, a perfect anything. This concept of perfection is ridiculous. You can't achieve it. You can do your best. You can shoot for it, but you're never going to achieve it. So you don't need to be cynical or pessimistic, right? You need to look at what good can come. Where are you trying to go? What are you trying to accomplish, right? In order to do that, you need energy and enthusiasm and passion in order to do that. Look, apathy robs you of your energy, and it steals your goals and dreams. Look, passion and energy are the fuels to creating what you want. Without them, it's impossible to realize your goals and dreams. When I was building my business, folks, I was so clear about what I want to accomplish in my business. I was crystal clear about how I wanted my business to create a certain kind of life and lifestyle for me and my family. I was crystal clear on what I wanted, and I visualized it every day. I was so focused and clear on my goals and dreams and visualized exactly the way it was going to be. I talk about this a lot, but one of the things that really got me going, that really allowed me to stay focused, stay on top of it, to keep prospecting, to keep following up, to do all the work, to call all those people that are on my chicken list, and to improve myself, to get up in front of people and speak and train people, all those things. What got me to do that, folks, is I had a vision of how I wanted to live my life. Jan and I, when we were building our business in the beginning, we would have a good month, and we would reward ourselves. We would go to Palm Springs for the weekend. We'd go, actually, Saturday training, I'd get done with that around noon, and we'd be on the road by 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon, driving out to Palm Springs from where we lived. It was about a 90-minute drive, and it was like a different world. We'd stay in a nice hotel with our two kids, Dak and Jan. They were little at that time. They were like 6 or 7 years old, or 8 or 9, right in that age group. We were getting started and starting to have a little bit of success. This was around 1986, or late 1985 or 1986, when we started to make a little bit of money. Not a lot of money, but we were starting to make $6,000, $7,000, $8,000, $10,000 a month. When we had a good month and I did what I was supposed to do, we would reward ourselves. We'd leave and stay one night in a hotel. We'd leave around 1 or 2, get there 2.30, 3 o'clock in the afternoon. We would go and check into the hotel, then we would go to a really nice dinner at a nice restaurant. A nice restaurant, not to Applebee's or not to some dump, but somewhere nice where it was not cheap. Because we like food, right? We're foodies. We would go to a really nice restaurant, and then we'd go catch a movie. Then we'd come back and watch some TV or whatever. Then wake up in the morning, and it would be Sunday morning. We'd get up and order room service. They'd bring the room service with a newspaper. We always had a room that overlooked the swimming pool, so the kids would go out to the pool so we could see them. We'd be in bed. We'd eat breakfast. We'd read the paper. We would just lounge. Then after, we'd check out of the hotel, maybe at noon or something like that. Then we'd go look at model homes at country clubs. Because all the country clubs, there are tons of country clubs out there, and they'd have these model homes that are professionally decorated. They always had the model homes in a perfect location overlooking the water with a waterfall. Just gorgeous. The weather is just 70, 75 degrees. Sunny, not a wisp of air. Just beautiful. We'd go look at these model homes, and I would just dream about that. On the way home, all I would be thinking about is I've got to get my business going. I've got to call all these people. I've got to get my recruiting. I've got to prospect more. I've got to do more. I've got to stay focused. I would be there one night, basically a day and a half or something like that. All I knew is I wanted to live that way, because that was like being on vacation. I wanted to live as if we were on vacation all the time. I knew in order for me to do that, I had to build a big, big base shop. I had to produce a bunch of RVPs. I had to really train people so they got really, really good, so that they could operate independently of me. I knew I had to do that, and I knew how to build something. I had to build a big base shop so I could produce those RVPs. So everything about what I was doing every day, I thought about how it would be to live like I was on vacation, and that drove me to make every call. I didn't worry about getting rejected. I didn't worry about the fear of what they might think about me or any of that stuff. I just was focusing like a laser beam on how I wanted my life to be. I think for most of you, you don't even know what you want your life to be. I want to make more money, or I want to live in a nicer house, or I want to have a nicer car. But it's not specific. It's not clear, and you're not visualizing it and imagining it with the clarity of a movie like I did. You need to start doing that. So what that did is whenever I thought about letting up or not making that call, I thought about, Hector, you're never going to have that house in Palm Springs. You're never going to be able to live on a golf course. You're never going to have what you want to have. It's not like as if you're on vacation. You're never going to do that. If you don't make this call, if you don't follow up, if you don't learn this material, if you don't learn how mutual funds work, or how cash value is a pile of crap and how to destroy it, or how to set appointments, or how to overcome all the most common objections, or how to recruit somebody to Kitchentale, you need to learn how to do all that stuff. If you ever want to get those things, if you ever really want to be free, if you ever want to do something great, I would think about that. I would see that. I'm just pointing out to you folks how I got myself to do what I did. So the only way that you're ever going to get yourself to really do what you need to do, you need to get crystal clear about what it is you want to accomplish in your business. The business for me, look, I love Prime Merrick. I love what we do. But the business isn't my life. The business was a tool for Jan and I to create the life that we were dreaming about, that we were experiencing from time to time. That's what Prime Merrick is. It's an amazing, incredible, fantastic, positive tool that helps people that can allow you to create an amazing life for you and your family. But you better get clear on what it is you want. You can't be apathetic about it. You've got to have high energy and totally passionate about your goals and dreams and what you want to accomplish. And you've got to get crystal clear. And you've got to stop being distracted. Because distraction, this is something I came up with. It's a great little quote. Distraction leads to your economic destruction. Let me repeat that. Distraction leads to your economic destruction. Every time you get distracted in your business, whatever comes up, there's all kinds of stuff that can distract you from prospecting, setting appointments, working on your skill sets, mastering those seven fundamentals. There's always something pulling you away that's distracting you. But what happens when you allow that to happen, it leads to your economic destruction. Look, while you're busy looking at distraction's fancy moves, distraction blindsides you with a knockout punch. Distraction is a pleasure to watch work. You can't take your eyes off of him. As soon as you think you've got him figured out, he brings out something new to drag away your attention from what it is you should be doing to create the dream life you want. And when you realize you're bored, he brings new novelties and trivialities like the internet, like TV, like sports programs, like softball, like bowling, like whatever, all the stuff that gets you distracted. You know what it is in your own life, right? There's all kinds of stuff. There are thousands of potential distractions if you allow them into your life. Key words, if you allow them into your life. You decide whether distractions take you off track, off course, or not. Distraction is a joy to watch, but while you're watching him, he steals your focus and your attention. Without focus and attention, it's impossible to succeed. You have to have focus and you have to have attention to what it is you're trying to accomplish. Because if you don't, you cannot succeed. Look, you beat distraction by giving yourself over to your real work, which is prospecting, preparing, following up, training, developing other people, and ignoring the pleasant and interesting things that distraction waves in front of you. Look, your most dangerous enemies are fear, procrastination, apathy, and distraction. Unless you fight them and win, they're going to rob you of everything you hold dear. They're going to rob you of that future you dream about. They're going to rob you. And they can't rob you without your participation, without your approval. They can't do that. You decide whether they rob you or not. Look, this is why I talk relentlessly about self-discipline, guys, and work ethic. Because it overcomes virtually any deficiency that you might have. Even those people that appear to be super talented, you can clean their clock if you have superior self-discipline and superior work ethic. A lot of the people that you're so impressed with right now, they don't have that. Look, I've seen countless RBPs in my own organization with amazing potential. I have multiple people that right now should be making a million dollars a year or more, but they got derailed because of a lack of self-discipline, which is really basically doing the things you know you must do, regardless of how you feel about doing them, and doing it anyway. That's what self-discipline is. Let me repeat that. To me, self-discipline is simply doing what you must do, regardless of how you feel about doing it, and doing it anyway. If you let how you feel about doing what you need to do dictate whether you do those things or not, you're toast. You can't win, not win big. I've got guys that are phenomenal across the continuum, that are great at training people, but they don't prospect. They haven't recruited to direct in who knows how long. They don't prospect themselves. They don't do all the fundamental things that they did earlier in their career where they had a lot of success. They built big bay shops, and now they have little tiny bay shops. They're just trying to make enough money to meet their obligations now. I can't tell you how many RBPs I have like that. It's really sad to watch because they're immensely talented people, but they don't have self-discipline. Their work ethic is suspect. It's not what it could be. I'm not saying this to chastise them or to judge them. I'm just pointing out what's happened. If they could somehow figure out how to reinsert self-discipline and work ethic into their lives today, they could go on and make a million dollars a year. I don't know if they'll do that or not, but that's been my observation. What are your most dangerous enemies? You heard it, right? Same thing. Fear, procrastination, apathy, and distraction. Look, in the final analysis, it takes courage to succeed, folks. Courage isn't the absence of fear. It's doing it in spite of your fear. That's all it is. That's all it is. Is distraction taking you from something that would produce real results in your life right now? Probably. Look, don't let these culprits take what it is you're capable of doing with your life. Don't allow it. You know what you can do. You know what you need to do. You know whether you're checking yourself every hour. You know whether you're wasting time or making time. You know whether you're investing your time or spending your time. You know. You know. You know exactly what you're doing and you know exactly why you're not having the results you should have. You don't need to have me tell you that. You know. Maybe you need to be reminded. I don't know. But you know why you're where you're at. You know if you're ultra confident and you've done all the work to prepare yourself and you know exactly what you need to be doing and that you're capable of doing. You know. You know. You know. Come on, you know. Don't let a lack of self-discipline and a lack of work ethic rob you of the kind of life that you can potentially have. Don't let it. Don't allow it. Change it. Change it now. Get busy. Do something great with your life. Life is short. It goes by really, really fast. Don't waste any more time. Talk to you next week.