Читать книгу Defcon 1 Direct Selling - Randy Gage - Страница 33

If you read my last book, you know I make two promises to everyone I enroll:

1 I will never knowingly lie to them.

2 I will never knowingly tell them something that is not in the best interests of their business.

But being a truth teller goes much further. It means you respect people enough that you don’t pander to them or just tell them what they want to hear. Nothing is more harmful to a person’s growth and development than having coaches or mentors who only compliment and indulge them with “happy talk” and don’t keep their guidance grounded in reality. Most of us have surrounded ourselves with people who give us permission to stay the same. We all need people in our lives who love and respect us for who we are—yet also challenge us to become better versions of ourselves.

Let me share a story from early in my career about the first time I met some people high up in my sponsorship line, a couple who were one of the top-earning distributorships in the world. They told me something that devastated me—and ultimately created one of the biggest breakthroughs in my life.

That couple was Spencer and Shivani Poch. They lived in Sacramento, with a team that spanned all around the country. I was in Miami, hundreds of levels down in their organization. They had heard about a training I was conducting for my team and asked if I would be willing to come to California and present it to their group there. Of course, this was the highest honor they could bestow upon me, elevating and edifying me on their stage. I eagerly jumped at the opportunity.

The evening before the event, they graciously took me out for dinner, so we could get to know each other. I was starstruck just spending time with them, eager to impress them with my work ethic, tenacity, and desire to become successful. I did what I always did in those days: regale them with story after story of the trauma, drama, and victimhood in my life.

I explained what a loser my own sponsor was and how much harder I had to work because of him. I spoke about the guy who had his credit card declined for his order on the last day of the month, which meant he didn’t qualify for a rank, which in turn made me unqualified for my rank and cost me a lot of commissions. (There was no Internet then. You didn’t know your actual sales and rank until two weeks later, when the checks were issued.) I complained about all the lazy ignorant people in my team, my health challenges, my dysfunctional relationships, and all of the other unfair things the universe was assaulting me with at that point in my life.

Looking back on that dinner now, I can recognize my whining for what it truly was: working my fulltime job as a professional victim. This whole story was an almost prerecorded “data dump” I did anytime I talked about myself. It was my desperate subconscious attempt to feel worthy, just an innocent victim fighting the forces of evil. I had zero awareness of this at the time of our dinner in California.

I thought I was just explaining why all of the bad things that happened to me weren’t my fault, that I was simply a very unlucky person the universe was conspiring against. I was quite sure Spence and Shivani were duly impressed with my strength and resilience. Until we were getting into the car after the dinner.

Just before we climbed into the car, Spence looked at me and asked quietly, “Randy, have you given any thought to what you might be doing to attract all of these bad things in your life?”