Hector_LaMarque_-_Mental_Toughness_-_01_Mental_Toughness

The speaker discusses the importance of mental toughness in achieving success. They emphasize that setbacks and challenges are inevitable, and it is crucial to decide in advance how to react to them. The speaker shares their own experience of treating challenges as opportunities for growth and improvement, rather than getting discouraged. They compare building a business to going through college, where each year offers new learning experiences. The speaker encourages listeners to approach their Primerica business with a long-term view and to focus on personal growth and improvement. They share their own journey in Primerica, starting from their freshman year, and highlight the importance of gaining experience and training to build confidence. The speaker concludes by discussing their progression and success in the business over the years. The following material is copyrighted. It is intended solely for training purposes within the Lamarck Hierarchy. Any unauthorized duplication, reproduction, or distribution outside of the Lamarck Hierarchy is prohibited and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent allowable by law. Hey, welcome. This is CD 2, and the topic is Mental Toughness, What it Takes to Win in Primeirica. You know, one of the things that I've discovered over the years is that I've recruited countless numbers of people, you know, had everything going for them to be successful and become wealthy here, but they lacked the mental toughness part. Every time they got a little setback, they bolded their tent and went home. They would just be shut down. They'd get depressed, and they would just quit. You're not going to win at anything unless you develop a certain level of mental toughness, because when you're building a business or when you're living life, you're going to have a lot of challenges. There's no way around them. The only place there aren't any is when you're six feet under, guys. One of the key things to developing mental toughness is first deciding in advance how you're going to react to challenges. Deciding in advance, what you do is you acknowledge the challenges that are going to present themselves. They're going to happen, that's for sure. If you have a pre-planned response, it's going to take the sting out of that challenge. If you go into life knowing that some things are going to go wrong, and they're not going to go exactly as planned, and you know that you're going to react with the right point of view, the right mindset, when the challenge happens, you're not going to panic. You're not going to go in that useless question of, why me? Poor me. Why does everything happen to me? Instead, you're going to go right into resolving the challenge, which is what all winners do. What winners do, they have the same kind of challenge. They have chargebacks. They have people not show up. They have business fall off the books. They have people quit. All those things happen to all the people who have won big. It's happened to me over and over again. I decided in advance that when that happened, I was going to look at every challenge as kind of like a wake-up call to, hey, Hector, you've got to get a lot better at this. You're a little deficient in this area. You need to go to work and shore up this weakness. That's the way I looked at it. So I never got down when I had a setback or when something didn't go right. I looked at it like an opportunity for me to grow and get better. Does it mean you have to like it? Of course not. You're not going to like any of those challenges, but you've got to know how you're going to react in advance. You're going to have to make the decision in advance that when they happen, you're not going to let that detour you. You're going to keep trudging forward and keep moving in the right direction. One of the things I know is that I'm going to have challenges until the day I die. I decided in advance that I would treat every one of those challenges as an opportunity to grow and improve in areas that I might be currently weak. That was really the fundamental choice I made. Many challenges are a result of being ill-prepared or needing to shore up a weakness. That's one of the things you're going to find out. A lot of times when you're having constant problems in areas, it's because you have a weakness there and you need to fix it. If you have a continuous focus on growing and improving, the number of challenges you're going to have is going to decrease. They don't go away completely, but one of the things I found out is I got better and I grew and I got more competent. The number of challenges I have started to be less and less. Today, I still have them, but I don't have nearly as many. When I have them, the ones that used to seem so overwhelming seem like nothing, just a little minor issue. That's really good. The other thing, too, is as you get better and you grow yourself, the duration of the challenges are going to be a lot shorter. They're not going to be as long. One of the keys to being mentally tough, folks, is you've got to develop a long-term view of life and of the business. The way I thought about my Primerica career was like this. I kind of looked at being in Primerica when I started like I was going back to college. One of the things is that before I started Primerica, I had a BA, but I was thinking about going back and getting a master's in business. The reason I was thinking about going back and getting a master's is I wanted to make more money. I wanted to be more successful. When I started my Primerica business, I looked at it like going back to college. You don't go to college for a semester and learn everything you need to know to graduate and have a successful profession. That's not the way it works. What you do is you have a freshman, a sophomore, a junior, and a senior and then you graduate and have a chance to go on and have a successful career or you go on to graduate school for more preparation and whatever your chosen career is. You don't go from being a freshman in your first semester to a senior. That doesn't work that way. So I thought about this like I was going back to school, especially when you're a freshman in high school or college. You don't know anything. You don't know where you are. You don't know where anything is. You're nervous. You're meeting new people. It's kind of a scary time when you're a freshman. By the time you're a sophomore, you're a little more comfortable, a little more confident. You know where things are. It's not so overwhelming. By the time you're a junior, you start getting really confident. You kind of just know your way around and there's all these sophomores and freshmen to pick on and you're okay. And then when you're a senior, you're cool. You're it, right? You're having a great time. You know what's up. You know what to do. And then you feel really, really confident. So I looked at Primeric like that. Right now, you're all starting your freshman day. So it's scary. You don't know everything. You don't know where everything is. You don't know how to do everything. You don't know if you can do it. And that's normal. What you've got to do is just look at it like it's a long-term thing. Four years from now, you're going to know everything. You're going to be really good and you're going to be making a lot of money. So don't worry about how you feel right now. Why not take that kind of point of view in building your Primeric business? So I looked at each year as a learning experience I needed to have to graduate with honors and have a fantastic career. Because one of the things too, I constantly tell people, I ask this question when I'm doing talks, how many of you, if you had a chance to go back, start high school over or go back and do college over, how many of you would study harder, would try to get on the honor roll, would really try to learn what you needed to learn? How many of you would do a better job if you went back? Invariably, nearly 100% of the room raised their hand. Okay. Well, why don't you look at this Primeric of business opportunity as that chance to go back and start over and become an honor student and to graduate with honors. That's kind of how I looked at it. That's what was my thought process in doing that. This is how it started for me in my freshman year in Primeric was 1984. I got all my licenses. I went on about 20 to 25 training appointments with the idea and the intention of learning all I could to really soak up every experience to see how people reacted so that when I was on my own field training new agents, I would be really good and I would have the ability to get great results and train people well so they could go on and build their own successful Primeric of business. So I was really thinking, heck, they're going a lot of appointments, check everything out so that by the time you get licensed, you really know what you're doing. You're really confident. I wasn't worried about, oh, am I going to lose a commission? I didn't worry about that because I knew that if I got good when I started recruiting other people and training those people, that I was going to more than make up for that. I was more concerned about getting really good at the business because if you're good, you're going to be here for a long time. You're going to make a lot of money. I think your concern should be focusing on how good you can get. So that turned out to be a very good thing because by the time I started seeing clients on my own, I was very confident that I could get results and effectively train people. I wasn't hoping I could do it. I knew I could do it because I'd had a lot of experience, a lot of training. This also gave me the confidence to go full time 10 months after I started the business and to get promoted to regional vice president 17, 18 months after I got started. I did that because of how I started. Let's go back and look at my freshman year. 1984 again was my freshman year. I earned $18,000. I didn't know what I was doing, learning how to do anything, getting my licenses, learning how to set appointments, learning how to do a good presentation, learning how to get referrals, learning the different products and how to present them and how to explain them. I had to answer questions. I just looked at it like I was learning everything. I enjoyed the process and I made mistakes, but I learned. I got better. In 1985, my sophomore year, I started to get the hang of the business. That year I earned $35,000. I started to get a little better. I was starting to learn how to train people. I got better at the products. I got better at every part of the business. In 1986, my junior year, I discovered how to manage my time better. I wasn't very good at managing my time early. I was always working with people I shouldn't have been working with. I made a lot of mistakes. By the time my junior year rolled around, I was starting to get really good. I got a lot better at spending time with the right people. I was more efficient and I began to start getting really great results. I learned how to train people to get the same kind of results I was getting. I started to learn how to be really repetitious with people and go over and over and over how I did things, explaining things in really pretty exact detail, answering questions, that sort of thing. This caused my business to really take off. I earned $86,000 in 1986. That was my junior year. By the end of the year, I developed a fairly large space shop. I started doing some pretty good numbers at that time. My senior year, everything started to come together. I became even more efficient. I learned even better how not to waste time with people who weren't motivated. I began to understand you really can't motivate people. You had to find motivated people and train them really well so they could feel confident and get results and make money. I think a lot of people waste a lot of time in Prime America trying to motivate people that just aren't motivated. It's a lot better use of your time to go look for people that are motivated, that do want to do something, that will listen, that will be coachable. I learned people stayed in Prime America if they felt they could do Prime America and make money. I really started to see that. If they felt like they could make money, they would stay. I focused more on training people on how to get the kind of results I did because I was really good at getting results because I worked very hard at getting good at that. I worked equally as hard at training people to do exactly what I was doing, to say exactly what I was saying, to present exactly what I could present, to ask questions like I asked questions, to overcome the objections like I did, to do everything, to manage my time like I did. I really spent a lot of time doing that. This is when I began producing a lot of new leaders who believed they could become regional vice presidents with the ability to make big money. The better I trained them, I could start seeing their confidence low and they started really believing that they could be regional vice presidents. By the way, I was paid in that next year, what I call my senior year, $409,000. That year my life began to change considerably. I really started believing I could really get wealthy building a Prime America business. My first year out of what I call, for lack of a better term, Prime America University because those first years I was just going to school learning how to do this thing. Now I'm out. I'm in the real world. I'm building my Prime America business. My fifth year things really came together. Many of the people who I spent a large amount of time training began to explode their own businesses. Many of our people began to see themselves becoming wealthy also. The energy in my organization was incredible. Since we all had the same philosophy and that philosophy, you're going to hear me say this over and over again, is get wide and build a big bay shop. This common business philosophy caused our business to grow very quickly. Today is a root cause of our current success. Right now we're experiencing a resurgence with a whole new group of young entrepreneurs with the same get wide and build a big bay shop philosophy. They're on their way to becoming financially independent as well. I've been doing this for 22 years. This year is just going to be off the charts exciting because we've got so many people that really are buying into that philosophy of getting wide. What I mean by get wide, it's recruiting direct agents, going out there and always finding new direct agents to recruit and focusing on building a big business. What I want to say here is I want to give yourself time to learn all the various things and become successful at Prime America. You're not going to learn them all in the first two months. It's going to take some time. Regardless of where you are right now or your previous background, you can, if you desire, learn and become successful at building your own financial service business. Thousands of other people have done it who likely had a lot less going for you than they did at the start of the business. Listen, one of the things that's important to you, I was talking to my son, Dak, earlier. Be patient because when I came into Prime America, I had some experience. I'd been managing salespeople in the jewelry business. It wasn't exactly the same, but I had a pretty good understanding of how to train people. I also understand that most people don't work out because they just don't work. I used to have to fire people in my other business all the time. I was real patient with that. I knew it was going to take time to find the right people. I knew it was going to take time for me to learn the business. I didn't rush it. I didn't get impatient with myself. I just really focused on making progress all the time. That's what you need to do. Take a longer-term view of this thing. Don't get down and dejected because things don't go right the first 60, 90, or even a year. Give yourself a chance. In most cases, this is a totally new type of business to you. Something you've not done before, and you're not going to learn it in a couple of weeks. It's going to take some time, but give yourself a chance. Thousands of people will learn how to do it. You can learn how to do it, too. If you follow the system that I've created, I promise you, you will get it all you need to do to be successful if you apply yourself.