BUILD YOUR PROFESSIONAL NETWORK

Every day of the week is an opportunity for you to continue to BUILD your Professional Network. Every person you meet is an opportunity for you to continue to BUILD your Professional Network. Read those two sentences 5 times right now!

Your THINKING has to change to uncover the amazing network you have right next to you! Think about your customers, your family, your managers, trusted advisors, anyone you know! FIND 10 people you trust and want to see you succeed, ask them who they think could benefit from your products and services, each person will give you at least 2 perhaps 3 new contacts. CALL each of those 30 contacts do you see where I'm going with this? You are limited only by your
NOT ASKING!

Today is the day your thinking changes go right now and start building your network! There is no end to how large it can grow!

Murphys Law?

Have you ever noticed that just when things look their best, when everything is falling into place, we start looking around for the person or thing that's going to pull the rug out from underneath us?

And have you ever noticed that someone or something always does?

Is it coincidence? Murphy's Law? Or something much more sinister--ourselves?

Nine times out of ten, I'd say it's the third.

We sabotage ourselves daily and don't even realize it. We've built up a wall of protection around ourselves that lets us say, "Yeah, I knew it was too good to be true."

"Who did I think I was going after that account? Of course they wouldn't go with a little company like mine."

Ever stop to think that you could have created the bad situation so you would fail purposely?

Sounds sick, I know, but we do it to ourselves constantly.

We have two different "minds," if you will. The Conscious and the Sub-Conscious.

The Conscious mind is the one that does all the thinking and planning. It has the ideas to go after the accounts you really, really want, and it figures out how to get themhow to prepare the proposals, set the appointments, etc.

The Sub-Conscious mind's job is to protect you. It has its own picture of who you are that was formed and reinforced in your childhood. Its job is to protect that person at all cost. Protect it even from your Conscious mind that wants that person to grow and expand.

In other words, if you're trying to strike out and create a new life and new identity for yourself through your business, you've got a war going on inside of you.

If you don't understand your Sub-Conscious mind and its role in your life, it will almost always win. You can't fight back if you don't know who the "enemy" is, right?

Once you figure out how you're sabotaging yourself and why, you can use that information to consciously change the programming of your Sub-Conscious mind. You can begin to train yourself to get out of your way.

Everything we do in life comes from the biologically driven need to either avoid pain or gain pleasure.

We will almost always do far more to avoid pain than we ever will to gain pleasure.

An example would be:

I'd be in my studio creating an absolutely gorgeous prototype holiday gift.

I could imagine the great pleasure I was going to have when I sold 1000 of them to one of the biggest companies in the area. I'd have arrived. I'd be successful then. It would be GREAT! Orders would start rolling in and I'd be so busy I
wouldn't know what to do with myself.

But I didn't leave my office to go market that gift or my service. I sat in my office hoping clients would call me. Ididn't want to risk the pain of that, or any company, telling me they didn't like my designs and my service.

My sub-conscious mind was protecting me from the possible pain that could result from a client telling me no. But at the same time my conscious mind didn't know what the heck was going on. It couldn't fight back.

At any given time, whatever you're focusing on is real. Your perception is REAL to you.

When I was focusing on the pleasure of selling that particular gift--that pleasure was real to me. Just like when I was focusing on the pain of possible rejectionthat pain was real, too. Remember, my sub-conscious mind's job is to protect me from pain, so since my conscious mind didn't know to override it, I sat in my office wondering why the phone wasn't ringing.

If you want to change your behavior, the trick is to focus your attention on how NOT changing it will result in more pain than changing it. And then focus on the pleasure you will gain from the change.

Use the pain and pleasure mechanism rather than letting it use you.

Let's do a little exercise here...

* Write down four things you know you really should do, but that you have been putting off.

* Think about each and write down specifically what pain you associate with them that has kept you from doing them.

* Now write down all the pleasure you've gained from NOT doing them.

* Now write down the pain you can associate with NOT doing the tasks. How will it hurt you not to do them?

* Finally, write down all the benefits and pleasure you will get from actually doing each of these tasks.

Review what you've written and you'll probably realize that there will be a lot less pain and a lot more pleasure if you just do whatever the tasks are.

Now that you've identified the cause of your procrastination, you can attack it head on and go after the results you want.

You can get out of your way and take action today!

Remember this technique whenever you find yourself not getting the results you want. Ask yourself if you're getting in your own way. If you are... MOVE!