HL January 29,13

The speaker discusses the importance of self-discipline in five areas for salespeople and leaders. He emphasizes that success is determined by one's thinking and preparation. He shares his own experiences and the example of Tiger Woods' dedication to practice. He urges listeners to stay disciplined and prepared, as it will lead to confidence and better results. The speaker also highlights the impact of self-discipline in sales, recruitment, and leadership. Hey, everybody, and listen, great day to you. I'm going to talk today about five areas where self-discipline makes a difference for salespeople and leaders. But before that, I'm working with some PGA Tour professionals on their thinking to try to help them to just get better performance. And the real key to everything, to your performance, to PGA professionals' performance is the way that you think, the way that you operate. Your success that you're currently experiencing or your lack of success is 100% attributable to the way that you think. It's your thinking that creates everything in your life. Every single thing that's happening in your life, that's happened in your life, has come about from the way that you think. You may not want to accept that, but it's true. And if things are going great, you have good thinking. If things are going poorly, then you don't have good thinking. It's really that simple. And what you really need to be working on constantly is the way that you think, so that you think right. Because right thinking leads to right actions. Right actions lead to the kind of results that we want. Wrong thinking leads to bad results, bad action. And bad action leads to bad results, right? So I sent this to one of my guys that I'm working with. And he had a really good year. Last year, he made $1 million on the PGA Tour. He's doing great, but he really feels like it'd be a lot greater, just like a lot of you where you did OK, but you could do a lot better. So this is what I wrote to him just the other day. I said, I have no doubt you'll be one of the greats. It's always the process. Because you cannot always determine the outcome, but you can always determine the process and your level of preparation. The better your preparation, the more confident you'll be. The more confident you are, the better your performance will be. And as a result, the better your outcome will be, which is what I've been trying to share with you over these calls. Every week, I'm trying to get you to work on yourself to get better, because you need to grow your self-confidence. And if you start growing your self-confidence because your preparation's better and your ability to get results is better, things will start improving, which is the same thing you need to be doing with your people. Your ability to prepare your people is going to allow them to be more confident. It's going to allow them to do better, have better performance, and it just kind of snowballs in that direction. So I said, but the key is in the process and preparation. I felt like I deserved success. I'm talking about me here. I never felt lucky. All the success I've experienced has come from over-preparing and over-delivering. This is a big thing. This is one of the things I've always focused on that you need to focus on. You need to over-prepare, do way more preparation than you even think you need to do, and you need to over-deliver to your recruits and to your clients. I said, I also discovered that constant preparation and working on my thinking, which I do every day, by the way, still. And when I tweet out, you can follow me on Twitter at Hector Lamarck. And those things that I'm tweeting out are things that I've read or that I'm reading, or things that I'm thinking, that have allowed me to be successful, which is why you should look at that every day. It would take you, essentially, two minutes to look at all that stuff every day. You should look at those every day. They're all there. I've sent out over 2,000 tweets. You can even go back and look at them all if you'd like. And you can use them if you'd like. You can share them with your people. I don't care. I think that those little nuggets of food, mental food, are critical to the way that we operate and the success that we ultimately have. So I said, I also discovered constant preparation. And working on my thinking made me feel better about me, which it did. So me working on myself, me preparing, me doing the work, made me feel good about me, which spilled out into all areas of my life, made me more attractive. Because as I see myself feeling good, knowing I'm doing the work, knowing I'm prepared, knowing I know what I'm talking about, all that made me feel confident, made me feel like I could do it. And that exuded out to potential recruits and potential clients that could sense that I really was prepared, that I knew what I was talking about, and that I would be, if they were interested at all, that I would be a really good person for them to either do business with or be in business with. This is very important, what I'm saying right here. So I said, what I see often is people work hard for a time to reach a certain level of success. And I was at an RVP meeting just recently, and I saw a lot of people that I hadn't seen for a long time, a lot of people that had been doing very, very well at one time that right now aren't doing as well as they'd like. And the reason that they're not doing as well as they'd like is what I'm about to say. So I see people who work hard for time to reach a certain level of success. They get their RVP promotion. Maybe they get their base up to $30,000. Maybe they get their income to $100,000 or $200,000 or even $500,000. But when they achieve it, when they get there, when they start getting the kind of results that they've worked so hard to achieve, they stop doing daily what caused them to get those kinds of results in the first place. They stop prospecting. They stop field training people. They stop putting on great means. They stop working on themselves. They stop doing all the things that allow them to move their businesses to the place where they could really start having success. When they achieve a certain level, they stop doing it. So it's only a matter of time until their results begin to decline. So that's what happens. All their results start to decline, right? And what's insidious about it is that it happens slowly. So they don't really see it until it's too late. But it definitely happens. But by the time they realize that things are going the wrong direction, their self-confidence starts to wane, and so do their results. So what I've told these guys is don't let that happen. Stay disciplined on your preparation, physical and mental. I said, I believe that's why Tiger Woods has been able to get the consistent kind of results over his career. He simply believes he deserves to succeed because of the level of preparation he constantly does. I'll give you just a perfect example of the preparation. Just one thing that I know from a friend of mine who's very good friends with John Cook. John Cook is a friend of Tiger Woods. They belong to the same club in Florida. John Cook was playing golf that day with his son. So he's on the range, and he sees Tiger on the range just starting to work out, just hitting nine irons. Just one club, a nine iron. And he asks him if he wants to. He goes, no, I'm going to practice. So they go play. They play their round of golf. It's about four hours. They come back. And there was a little patch of dirt when they left where he hits balls, and it digs out the grass, right? And you see a little bit of dirt. By the time he came back, there was a huge thing of dirt because he had hit so many balls for four hours, and he was still hitting that same club over and over. For four hours, he hit nine irons. Four hours. You know how disciplined you have to be to hit how boring that ends up being? But what happens, by doing that kind of repetition, you get to the point where you just, you groove in your swing. You have total self-confidence. And that's the kinds of things that great people do. They work, and they work, and they work, and they work on those fundamentals so that when they get in competition, in our case, you work on your fundamentals. So when you get in our competition, it's a kitchen table. When you get across the kitchen table from a potential recruit or a potential client, because you've done the work, the preparation, the repetition, right, the reps that you need to do, you feel like these people need to do business with me or these people need to join me because I'm really, really good. So they need to do business with me because I can help them more than anybody else, and they need to join me because I can help them more than anybody else. That's the kind of feeling you get that produces a kind of energy that people can literally feel. So when you're not prepared, which is most of you out there, I know you're not prepared, most of you, right? So you go into these situations, these appointments, where you don't have a lot of confidence because you haven't prepared, and guess what? The recruit and the client can feel it. That's why I am such a broken record about preparation because it will make all the difference between you having mega success or maybe just doing okay or maybe because you don't prepare, you wash out of the business because you don't make any money. So what I said is Tiger, he simply believes he deserves to succeed because of the level of preparation he consistently does. I said this isn't rocket science, it's simple. It's simply one's ability to manage oneself consistently. It's your ability to manage you consistently and the end is gonna determine where you end up. I know that's the reason I've had success and as I've studied hundreds of successful people over the last 30-odd years, that's the reoccurring theme, what I just said here. So I said go, go, go, and that's the kind of conversations I'm having with these guys, but it's the same conversation I have with you all that follow the stuff that I talk about. So let's talk about the five areas where self-discipline makes the difference for salespeople and recruiters and leaders and builders. So when I say salespeople, I also mean recruiters, okay? So you can just put sales slash recruiters. It doesn't really matter. This is just all fundamental stuff. The foundational attribute of all successful people, what they all share is self-discipline. It's their self-discipline that allows them to keep the commitments that they make to themselves and to other people. Successful people know that their good intentions don't add up to a hill of beans, and you've heard me say that in past weeks. It's their actions, it's your actions that make a difference in your results. It's not your intentions. You've heard it before, but it bears repeating. Successful people do what unsuccessful people aren't willing to do. Look, it's not that the unsuccessful are unable to do it. They're just unwilling to do it. Well, a lot of you, you know you need to master, you know your people need to master the seven fundamentals. It's not that you aren't able to do it. It's that you're unwilling to put the time to teach them or to put the time in to learn them yourselves. So these five areas, right, require a thoughtful, disciplined approach. The first is the discipline of prospecting, because that's where everything starts. Without prospecting, there's no appointments, there's no presentations, there's no closing, there's no recruiting, there's no nothing, okay? So you have to become a disciplined prospector. There's one area of sales and recruiting where self-discipline makes a tremendous difference, and it's rarely found. That is in the area of prospecting. One of the things that I did is I was a master prospector. I prospected every day, everywhere I went, all the time. I was always prospecting. I used to embarrass my wife and embarrass my children because I was talking to everybody everywhere I went, everywhere, always. So if you're not a little bit embarrassing to the people around you, then you're not really a master total focus prospector. Look, you can immediately produce better sales results by applying your self-discipline to prospecting. Salespeople, recruiters with no real sales abilities or skills often outperform those with greater skills or abilities simply through disciplined prospecting. That's why you see people in Prime America, some people are really sharp. Man, they talk well, they're really sharp. And you go, why aren't they doing better? I mean, as sharp as, and then you see a guy or a gal that doesn't have near the eloquence, let's say, right, that these people have, but they're kicking their rear end. How could that be? It's because of prospecting or the lack of prospecting. Look, you give yourself more opportunities through the discipline of prospecting. Are you gonna close everybody? Of course not. But the more you do it, if you're disciplined, you're gonna give yourself more opportunities. Over time, you're gonna get better and you're gonna start getting better results and you're gonna start passing up all your peers like they're standing still. Long-term, your results are going to be the product of your prospecting. So you must make prospecting a discipline, something that you talk about, do all the time. And if you're a trainer, you're a coach, you're a leader, you need to be talking about and training on prospecting all the time. Because if your people aren't prospecting, they're not setting appointments. If they're not setting appointments, they're not doing presentations. And if they're not doing presentations, they're not recruiting or selling. It all starts with prospecting. Number two, the discipline of nurturing. Look, your dream clients or your dream recruits, they already have, the recruits already have a boss and the clients already have somebody that's supplying them with whatever they have. Maybe even a partner. Ignoring and neglecting your dream recruits and your dream clients doesn't do anything to move you closer to the relationship that you need with them. The discipline of nurturing is what eventually opens the relationships, that opens up opportunities. Your effort to create value for your dream recruits and your dream clients before claiming any is what will eventually bear fruit. But only if you exercise the self-discipline to create and share new ideas with them, okay? So that they can get what it is they want. If it's a client, so they can get debt-free and financially independent. If they're a recruit, so they can build a successful business and get debt-free and financially independent. Who you are as a professional, right, either a recruiter or salesperson, is visible in your recruit and client list. If you want to add marquee, fantastic recruits, fantastic clients to that list, you have to have the discipline of nurturing, building relationships with those people, right? Every recruit that you ever gonna have, every client for the most part that you're gonna have after you go through your warm market is gonna be a stranger. And your ability to develop a nurturing relationship with those people is gonna determine where you end up. The discipline of following up, okay? Number three, look, your recruits and clients and dream recruits and clients, are they're judging you all the time. They're watching you and they're judging you, right? Your people that are in your base shop, your clients that you have are judging you. They're watching to see if you keep your commitments. Basically, if you do what you say you're going to do. This is true for your commitments, great or small, all of them. So if you're not a person that is determined and decided to do what you say you're gonna do, you're always going to, you're always gonna do less than you could do. You're always gonna wonder, why aren't I doing better? What's wrong? One of the things that's wrong is that you're not keeping your commitments. You're not doing what you say you're gonna do. If you say you're gonna do something, then doggone it, you better do it and get in the habit of doing it. If you don't know if you can do something, then don't say you're gonna do it. Just say, I'm not sure, I'll check back with you or something, but don't say you're gonna do something to a potential client or potential recruit, right? Or a recruit or a current client, right? Unless you are going to follow through and do it. It's one of the calls I made early. It's why you must write everything down. Put it in your planner so that if you tell someone you're gonna do something, you write it down. Say, I'm gonna look up this information for so and so. I'm gonna get back to them on X date and you put it in your calendar and you write it down so you do what you said you're going to do. If you tell somebody you're gonna call them next Thursday at 2 p.m., then you write that down in your calendar so that when that day comes on, you look, oh, I gotta call John at two o'clock and you call him, all right? Make sure you do that. Do what you say you're gonna do. The discipline of follow-up, right? The discipline of following up is more than just sending the email you promised to send. It's also the discipline of doing high-quality follow-up work. You make it easier for your recruit or your client to say yes when you observe the discipline of follow-up, right, basically just doing what you said you're gonna do, keeping your word and doing quality work. Practice the discipline of following up and be someone who can always be counted on. That's one of the great attributes you wanna have. You want people to say, well, when so-and-so says he's gonna do something or she says she's gonna do something I know it's already done because I know they're a person of their word. You want people to feel about you that way. The discipline of improvement. You can't afford to rest on your laurels, right? You've got to get better. You did the work to turn, say, your dream recruit, your dream client into a recruit or a paying client, but becoming complacent can cost you their business, right? If you don't follow up from quarter to quarter you have to improve what you do for your clients. You've gotta be getting better so your clients can get more value from you, right, and so that your recruits, which are also your clients by the way, get more value from you, right? Why would a person wanna stay with you if they exceed you, they pass you up in terms of their knowledge and their skills and all that? What would they need you for if you're not constantly staying ahead of the curve and offering more and better value to those people? This is especially true from a leadership standpoint when you're building a team. This is why you must constantly improve because if you have a person who is getting better, that's really focused and doing all the right things and they see you not doing that and they see that they have more information or more knowledge or more skill than you have, then what they start doing is they start looking outside of you for leadership from someone who has more information, more knowledge, more expertise than you do. You don't want that happening. You wanna keep growing so that no matter who you recruit, they always are looking to you because you have new information, new knowledge, new skillsets to share with them to help them grow. You've gotta stay ahead of your team. You have to share with them the value that you're creating as well as your plans for creating even more value together in the future. So you've gotta just always get better. This is so critical. People are looking for leadership. They're looking for somebody that knows more, is more proficient, more skilled, more knowledgeable that they can go to to get information, to get help, right? Get coaching, to get mentoring so that they can grow their life, their business, their income, whatever, right? That needs to be you. So practice the discipline of improvement and bring your recruits and your clients ideas that help to create new value. The discipline of personal development, the environment that we live and sell in is like nothing we've ever seen before, folks. It's changing all, now there's globalization, there's commoditization, there's disintermediation, mediation, makes for some tough sledding. In other words, things are changing and growing. I mean, look at how rapidly technology is changing. When I first got in the business, we didn't even use computers. I didn't even have a cell phone. Folks, I got my income to a million dollars a year without a phone, without a cell phone, no cell phone. I got my income to a million dollars a year without ever having a personal computer, ever, nothing. Now you've got all this incredible technology where you can do everything like on the spot in front of you, you could do an app and send it from a client's home. It's mind-boggling how everything's changed, folks. Success means that you have to become the very best possible version of yourself. You need to become you 2.0, folks. Look, it's the self-discipline of personal development, and this is why I talk about this all the time because there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that for me, all the success that I've experienced in business, folks, is a result of a mega self-discipline personal development commitment that I made in 1979, okay? A lot of you weren't even born in 1979. They're listening to this call, but I made a decision in 1979 that I was gonna work on my self-discipline. I was gonna work on my personal development like crazy, my leadership skills, my sales skills, my time management skills, everything, everything that I needed to be successful. I knew that I needed to get better in all the important areas for me to experience the kind of success that I ultimately did experience. I knew that back then, thank God. I had enough foresight to understand that me growing me was the most important thing I ever worked on, and I'm trying to relay to you and pass on to you something that not only that I discovered, that I know, that I've experienced personally, that that personal development that I committed to, right? Like I've read close to 1,500 books on all, you name it, from time management to sales skills to people skills to leadership to whatever, okay? I've read countless biographies of successful people, and I changed the way I thought about everything, and it put me in a position where by doing all that work on myself, I always kind of instinctively always have known what to do next. So I didn't really have a personal mentor. My upline in Prime America never helped me at all. I didn't ever have any help in that area. I didn't have anybody that I went to, right? All these books and tapes and seminars that I went to is where I learned all the stuff that I know about being successful, and so what I'm trying to relay to you, so important that you have a very self-disciplined personal development program, because if you don't grow yourself, and especially keep up so that you keep your attitude correct, right? So you keep growing, you keep your attitude right, you're never gonna become who you could become, who you really want to become, right? So the self-discipline, this personal development, it begins with your ability to eliminate distractions. You know what I would say is that distractions lead to your economic destruction in Prime America or any business for that matter. When you allow distractions, you're letting in the destruction of your economic future. You must learn to eliminate all the distractions, whatever's distracting you from improving, prospecting, doing appointments, recruiting people, training people, growing your business. You have to eliminate those distractions or you're never gonna be able to accomplish what you really want to accomplish. So write this down, right? Distractions will lead to my economic destruction. I must eliminate all distractions from my life. And you may seem kind of trivial to you, I'm telling you, it's critical. Instead of filing down, filling time with distractions and novelties, you have to use some of that time to improve yourself through reading, studying, taking a class, attending action-oriented webinars or seminars or whatever. You know, your car, you need to turn that into a university of success, listening to audios, on your MP3, on your phone, whatever, every chance you get. You know, for me, I always had a, I was reading five books at a time all the time. So I'd have a book in my car, I'd have a book in my briefcase, I had a book in my house, I had a book in my office, I had books everywhere where I was always, so if I had five minutes, 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, whenever I was on an appointment, and I got there maybe 20 minutes early, I'd get my book out, I'd read my book, right? Whatever book I had in my briefcase or my car, right? If I was, you know, at home, and I was in our library, right, I'd be reading that. It doesn't matter, I would be reading and trying to grow myself, because you don't realize at the time when you're reading this material, listening to these tapes, how it's gonna impact your behavior and your results when you're out there. It's all cumulative, so you keep doing it, keep pouring in that information, that knowledge, that way of thinking, and then all of a sudden, that stuff just comes out when you're speaking to a potential client, you're speaking to a potential recruit, you start surprising yourself how you're able to come up with these kinds of things that move people to action. It's incredible, but you can't do that if you're not growing yourself. Plus, you wanna be talking to your up-and-coming teammates and be able to offer them advice and offer them suggestions, or be able to know what to say, or if you're putting on a meeting, you wanna be able to have a lot of meat that you can share with people that they can take out and use that day to go get better results. One of the things, when I put on a meeting, I'm gonna be doing a meeting on March 9th at JP High in Ontario, and it's gonna be, part of it's gonna be about securities, because I think securities is critically important. You need to get a securities license and do tons of securities and help your clients in that way and help yourself, because it's a source of reoccurring income. You're crazy not to be securities licensed. In fact, you're an idiot not to be securities licensed. Pardon my language, but you are. You're just an idiot, because you don't see how it's costing you a fortune, and those of you who are leaders don't get your people's securities license, you're idiots, too, because you're shooting yourself in the foot economically. Pardon, again, my language, but I wanna make a point here, and then the second half is gonna be all me talking about how I built what I built, what I did to build my business, and what you need to focus on, what I focused on, what I did, what I thought about, what I talked about, what I taught, what I did to build my business. So it's not, there's no recognition, there's no motivation, because I don't believe in motivation. I think motivation's a crock, okay? I do believe in recognition. You recognize people, but this meeting's about getting better. It's about giving people meat. When they leave that meeting, they're gonna know what to do, what to focus on, and those that do it are gonna have great results. That's the way I always put on a meeting. No motivation. I get sick and tired of this motivating mumbo jumbo where now all you have is a bunch of motivated idiots that don't know what they're doing, don't know how to get results. They go out there, they get killed, because they don't have any skills, and they don't know what they're doing, and then they think Primerica doesn't work, and they wash out of the business, and they talk negatively about the business, because their leader didn't teach them what to do. It drives me insane, okay? Stop it. Start training your people. Look, you have to invest both time and money in improving the only real asset you'll ever have, and that is you. You are the most important asset you'll ever have. Look, once you learn the information, once you develop the skillsets, no one can ever take it away from you. What you know, like for me, if for some reason my business went away or whatever, I don't want that to happen, don't get me wrong, but I am not afraid because I know how to get results. I know what to do, I know how to think, I know how to act, I'm self-disciplined. I'm not ever worried about making money or whatever because I know what to do. I know how to recreate it. It's not like some secret. So the only security that you're gonna ever have in your life is your ability to produce and get results. You can't count on the government, they're broke. You can't count on your employer because they're gonna cut back. As soon as you start making too much money, they're gonna cut your hours and cut you back, right? You can't count on anything but yourself. So why would you not do everything you can to invest in you, the most important asset in your entire life? It's not your house, it's not your 401k, it's you. The practice, the discipline of personal development and continue to grow so you can make a greater contribution to everyone, right? So here's some questions. Is prospecting a discipline for you or is it something you approach sporadically whenever you think about it, whenever you get around to it or when things, all of a sudden you haven't done it for a long time and you're just not doing very well, you have no new recruits and you go, oh my God, I better prospect now. It's ridiculous. Should be something you do every day. How do you practice the discipline of nurturing your dream clients and your dream recruits? What actions do you take to help them, to show them you are valuable and how often do you do that? Do you capture and keep all the commitments you make regardless of how small the commitments might be? Do you write everything down so you don't forget? Do you have a disciplined approach to improving the value you create for your recruits and your clients? What is your discipline for improving you over time? What are the main components of your personal development plan? Do you have one? If you don't, you better get one, okay? You better get one. Don't wait for your, just don't be using excuses. Well, my upline doesn't do this or doesn't do that. BS, okay? You take charge. This is your life, it's not their life. Go pass them up. Go make more money than them. Go build a bigger business than them. Don't wait for them. Don't use that as an excuse. Don't use your family as an excuse. Don't use your spouse as an excuse. Don't lose your ethnicity as an excuse, your gender as an excuse, your lack of education as an excuse. Don't use anything as an excuse. Go get the information, knowledge, and skill sets and develop them and do it and go win. Thank you.