HL December 4,12

The speaker discusses the importance of not apologizing when asking for someone's time. Apologizing suggests that what you have to say isn't important and diminishes your confidence and presence. Instead, confidently state that you have something important to share and request a specific amount of time. Time is valuable and should not be wasted, so be confident in the value you bring. The speaker emphasizes the need to be knowledgeable and confident in your business to truly believe that others will benefit from your time. Personal development and continuous improvement are crucial in building confidence and success. Hey, good day, everybody. Hey, listen, I want to talk to you a little bit today about no apologies, no apologies. Look, if you're a value creator, there's no reason to apologize to people for asking for time. One of the things I've found is selling, recruiting, it requires confidence. It requires a presence. The way you carry yourself conveys that confidence and gives you that presence. So do the words that you use convey that? I mean, that's the reason you have to stop saying you're sorry. It's why you have to stop apologizing for taking your potential client or potential recruit's time. If what you have to say is important, say it confidently and with no apologies. Like saying this right here. So people say, I'm sorry to bother you. Folks, that is right there. It seems like a minor detail, but it's a big deal, right? If you begin your conversation with the words, I'm sorry to bother you, then you're conveying a couple of messages. By apologizing before you have even said a word, what you're doing is you're suggesting that what you're about to say isn't really very important. That's leading with the idea that what you have to say isn't gonna be valuable to the person you're speaking with. Look, if what you have to say isn't important, then don't say it at all. If it is, then don't apologize. Look, apologizing before you say a word is too differential. It isn't polite, it isn't respectful, it smacks of subservience, of weakness, right? Of cowardice. It looks like a lack of confidence and a lack of presence. Not only does it look like it is, it is. And it isn't the posture of someone who's a real value creator. And it isn't the right approach for somebody who wants to become a great recruiter and salesperson. Instead, what you should try is this. Look, I have something I need to share with you. I need 10 minutes of your time. Can we cover this now or can we put something on the calendar for later? Instead of begging for a minute of their time, right? A lot of times people say, listen, I'm only gonna take a minute of your time. Look, there's no more precious commodity than time. Time's one of those things you cannot replace. You can replace money, you can replace property, but you cannot replace time. Once you spend it on something, it can't be invested somewhere else. So this is why it's so important that you turn your car into a university. Because when you spend your time on music right now, if you're really serious about being successful, or you're watching TV instead of reading a book, right, reading something that can help you, that's time that you spent on something that now can't be invested somewhere, it's gone. So every time you waste time, every time you waste that little bit of time, you're just taking time that can't be invested in what you really want, which is growing yourself and growing your business. Look, no thoughtful person wants to spend time, their time, with someone who intends to waste it. But they will invest that time with people who deserve it. And especially people who believe that spending time with them is valuable. Look, when you begin with, I'm only gonna take a few minutes of your time, you're also suggesting that what you have to say isn't important. You're suggesting that the other person's time is more valuable than yours is, and that they could be doing something better than spending their time with you. Look, it's one thing to ask for a low-level commitment, like 20 minutes for an appointment, for a meeting, right, to qualify what your opportunity's all about. It's another thing to begin your conversation with a statement that destroys confidence in your ability to create value. Instead, try something like this. Look, I have two important things I wanna cover today, and it's gonna take us 15 minutes. I'm gonna dive in here. If we need more time, we'll schedule another conversation. Does that work for you? If it's gonna take a few minutes, then stop apologizing and get to it, okay? Just get right to what you're gonna talk about. Look, you've gotta see yourself as a value creator. Don't apologize. If the information that you have is important to the other person, don't say you're sorry unless you're wasting the other person's time. You have nothing to apologize for if you're a time waster, right? If you're a time waster, then by all means, you should apologize. You should probably owe someone as much. So how important are the language choices you make? Look, they're really important. The way you speak, the way you phrase things is critical to how people perceive you and whether people are gonna wanna go forward or not, right? One of the things why I talk about this incessantly, every call, about you getting better, right? If you feel like I felt, one of the things I did is I did my homework, right? I studied like crazy about everything related to our business. I became a master of how cash value works. I read everything that was available relative to how cash value, universal life, all that worked, okay? What's wrong with your life? Here's why Norman Dacey, Consumer Reports, et cetera, et cetera. I did tons of research on why cash value today. There's Susie Orman, there's Ramsey, Dave Ramsey, all these different people that if you studied how insurance actually worked and why buying term and investing a difference in an investment of some sort makes more sense than buying cash value. If you did your research, if you studied that like you should and got to the place where you were so ultra confident that you knew that if somebody, they needed to sit down with you and understand how this worked because you knew it backwards and forwards and you knew you could explain it to them in a clear way to get them to make the right choice for them and their family, right? Same thing with the investment side of the business. Same thing with every part, right? If you studied and you did your homework and you got super confident, you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt if you did an F&A for somebody and they followed that information that you shared with them and they did the solutions, implemented the solutions that you shared with them, you knew that they would be better off, you knew that they would get out of debt a year sooner, they would save tens of thousands of dollars, you knew that they would be able to retire in much better shape if they followed your advice, you knew that they would just in every way, shape and form be better off having met with you, having talked to you, then there's no need to apologize for the time. Then you can start looking at this thing in a different way like I did. I looked at it because I did that work and the way I felt about Primerica and about my business, the way I felt is like people that I was speaking with, people that met with me, they would be very, very, very fortunate to be able to meet somebody like me that could help them in such a dramatic fashion that I was gonna be able to do it. And then when I would recruit somebody, I felt the same way. Recruiting somebody, I knew that if I recruited somebody because I did my homework, because I prepared, because I overprepared, because I knew what I was talking about, because I became an expert on all these things I'm talking about. I knew, and not only that, I was an expert at closing sales and recruiting and all that. I did the work to become an expert, to become very, very, very good at it. I knew that if anybody would follow me, they would listen to me, they'd follow my advice, they would follow my example, they would do what I taught them to do, I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would be infinitely better off being associated with me than not being associated with me, that their future would be incredibly more rosy if they spent time with me, if they got involved with me, if they got involved in my business. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt if they actually did what I asked them to do, they actually did what I showed them to do, they actually did what my example showed, I knew they would be better off. So I believe that. So I never felt like, oh, if I could just have a minute of your time, I don't mean to bother you. I never felt that way. I felt like those people would be, are very in such an incredible situation that they could spend time with them. You might look at here this and think, well, that's kind of arrogant, but it's not arrogant if you can do it, if you can produce. That's why I'm such a proponent of personal development and getting better at every phase of the business, that recruiting, that setting appointments, that doing presentations, that understanding the products, that recruiting across the kitchen table, at time management, at leadership, at sales skills. That's why I'm such a proponent because what I want you to do is I want you to get to the place where you know that you know, not that you believe, that you know that people are gonna be better off either doing business with you or being in business with you. Look, one of the reasons most of you have a problem recruiting people and building a team and retaining people and all that is because you don't feel that way and you don't project that or you haven't done the work to feel that way because you can't feel that way unless you've done the work. You can't have that level of confidence unless you've poured yourself into becoming great at what you do and that's why I'm such a proponent of that and that's why you as a leader should be working like crazy to get better. Why do you wanna get better? Because you need to teach all that stuff so that your team can get better. If you don't know how to teach it, if you don't know this stuff inside and out, backwards, forwards, up and down in every which way, there's no way for you to teach other people to do it. There's no motivational thing that's gonna get people to stay here long range. There's no meeting that's gonna get people to stay here long range. The only thing that's gonna get people to stay here long range is them becoming highly competent and having the ability to get results on a consistent basis that leads to recruits and sales and income. There's no shortcut. You're not gonna get there. There's no shortcut to getting there. So you need to stop apologizing and you need to start getting better so that you can feel like you need to feel, okay, which is confident and competent, right, or competent and confident. Really, that's how it works because look, until you get super competent and listen, every one of you that I'm talking, you know how competent you are right now or how incompetent you are right now, right? Until you become super competent, this opportunity is never gonna be great for you because you can't duplicate greatness. Unless you become great at the business, there's no way to duplicate that greatness. Look, if you're mediocre at the business, if you're mediocre at the F&A, you're mediocre at sitting appointments, you're mediocre at doing a presentation, you're mediocre at overcoming objections, you're mediocre at recruiting, you're mediocre at training people, then all you can reproduce is mediocrity. That's why you, look, and you're not gonna become great overnight. It may take you a year or two, okay, assuming you're on this morning, noon, and night, every chance you get, right? If you're on getting better, it's gonna take time. You're not gonna get there overnight, but you're gonna get there and you're gonna see evidence of that improvement. Every month, you're gonna see a little bit better. You're gonna start getting better results. You're gonna start closing more sales. You're gonna start recruiting more people. You're gonna start making more money. Your people are gonna start having a little more success and then you keep getting better and better and better before you know it, you become great and you start transferring the skill sets and the knowledge that you've worked so hard to develop and the people that are motivated are gonna start growing and then your business is gonna start growing and you're gonna start having lots of success and then everybody's gonna think just like they think I am, right? They're gonna think you're lucky, but there's no such thing as luck. It's not luck. When you see people winning, you think people that are tremendous basketball players are lucky? You think people that are tremendous tennis players are lucky? Tremendous golfers are lucky? No. Right now, I'm a golf nut, okay? There's a kid named Rory McIlroy. He's 23 years old. He was a number one money winner on the European PGA Tour and he was a number one winner, earner, I'm sorry, earner, on the US Tour as well, PGA Tour. He won over 11, almost $12 million just on tournaments, okay? He's 23. Won a major, won five tournaments worldwide. This kid is amazing. He's 23. You know how long he's been working on his golf game? Since he's like two or three years old. So he's a 20-year overnight sensation, okay? Getting instruction, working on the fundamentals, all the stuff I talk about incessantly that virtually nobody listens to, all right? One of the reasons people don't really connect with the things I talk about because I talk about fundamentals and working hard are all things that people don't wanna do because it requires self-discipline and work ethic so people avoid that like the plague. Don't you be one of those people. Don't you listen to somebody who tells you there's an easy way, a quick way, a fast way. There isn't. There isn't. That's fool's gold, folks. What you do, it's those little choices you make hour by hour every day that are gonna lead to your success ultimately. And they don't happen overnight. Nothing happens overnight, okay? I was working on myself like crazy from 1979 to 1987 which is eight years, folks. My average income during that eight years was about $40,000 a year and I was spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on personal development, going to seminars. I was buying three or four, five, six, seven books a month. I was buying audio programs. I was doing all kinds of stuff, working on myself like crazy. I averaged about 40 grand a year of income from 1979 to 1987. 1987, all that work that I put into, right, all of a sudden I got really confident, really confident. Things took off. I became really good at training people. Also, my income jumped in 1987 to 409,000. The next year to 855,000. The next year and on from there, man, I ended up making over $60 million so far in Primerica. Okay, that didn't happen overnight. It's gonna take work on your part. That's all there is to it. So quit avoiding that. Quit listening to those people that are deceiving you, thinking it's simple and easy. It's not, it's work on your part, but it's worth it. Believe me, it's worth it. If you could just live my life for a week, you would go, oh my God, I can't believe this. This is incredible. I would do anything to live like this. I'm telling you, okay, you would feel that way. So get busy, get to work, go do it.