Spooky Time Thief No. 5 – Bad Communication

Do you remember playing the game called “telephone” when you were a kid? You sat in a line and one person whispered a piece of information to the person next to him or her and it passed from child to child until it reached the end of the line. The kid sitting at the end had to repeat what he/she heard out loud.

The result? The final statement rarely ended up being the same as the first. It’s fine when it’s a simple story or something nonessential. But it becomes a spooky time thief when words are twisted and bad communication results.

And in this day of multiple channels of communicating – text, email, phone, chat, etc. – bad communication is shared even more than ever. And it can cost you time and money.

It’s not an easy task, but it starts with good listening. Here are a few ways to ensure you catch bad communication before it catches you in a time warp:So, how do you catch this spooky time thief and reduce bad communications?

1. Reply back to the person who sent you an email and confirm the dates, times, etc. 
2. Relay back what you just heard on phone calls and in conversations. Take notes and review them when you are adding items to your calendar or prospect file.
3. Keep emails, texts and other e-communications short and to the point.
4. Always confirm appointments, get directions and clarify questions before meetings.

These four tips won’t save you from bad communication all the time, but they will greatly reduce the chance that you encounter bad communications. And any time you can do that, you’ll save time.

Action Item: Plagued by bad communications in your business? Check out two training resources – Ambit Pro Inviter Series and Brilliant Communicator Series. 

Get Organized for Ambit Success

How can someone be effective and make a lot of money with their Ambit Business if they can’t organize their life so that they are productive? They can’t!

Organization Worth Millions

It’s come to my attention through working with some new consultants that what is really keeping them from success is their lack of organization. After sharing with them what I’m about to share with you, they said, “that information was worth millions of dollars!”

Defining Organized & Productive

Organized means someone who plans their work activities efficiently so as to produce a desired result. Those who don’t plan, don’t have time to plan – nor be productive.

Productive means producing a specific result. Anybody can be busy. In fact, most people are. But are they producing their goals?

The Four Steps to Organization & Productivity

1. Start with seeing or visualizing the desired outcome before it occurs.
2. Predicting or estimating what needs to be done in order for the outcome to occur.
3. Seeing that each item that needs to get done does get done and in proper sequence.
4. Writing lessons learned so that you improve.

Seeing or Visualizing Outcomes

Start with seeing or visualizing the desired outcome before it occurs. A simple example of this would be that I’m organizing a business meeting (business opportunity meeting). So, I’ll start with the desired outcome(s):

• I see or visualize or, even better, diagram the event on paper.
• The event is in a professional and convenient location.
• The meeting is very professional and valuable to all that attend.
• I see 250 people attending with half of those as guests.
• I see the room full of energetic people having fun.
• I see the guests very interested in the meeting’s content.
• I see 100 of the guests becoming customers and/or signing up for the business after the meeting.
• I see the consultants excited and ready to do another event.

That’s the first step to being organized and productive – fully seeing the desired outcome BEFORE the event occurs.You get the idea of how to visualize?

Predicting or Estimating Projects & Tasks

Step 2 is to predict or estimate what needs to be done in order for the desired outcome to occur. This is the step where you break down your vision into projects and tasks that get done.

So, let’s continue with our example of putting on a business opportunity event. I break my vision of this event into three main projects.

• Project 1 - Hotel meeting location.
• Project 2 - The meeting content.
• Project 3 - People buying products and signing up.

See, I just broke my vision into 3 main projects.

So now that it’s broken into projects, let’s now break each project down into doable tasks that we can check off. By the way, that’s how you test whether you’ve simplified your project into a task or not – whether you can check it off as done. Tasks get the project done. Projects get the vision or goal done. Here are some sample tasks for each of our projects:

Project 1 -  Hotel meeting location 

• Contact 3 hotels in desirable locations and check availability and price.
• Decide on one location and a date.
• Get contract signed; make deposit if necessary.
• Email the hotel a list of items I want in the room – # of chairs, the room temperature, chair arrangement, etc.

Project 2 - Meeting content

• Decide length of content.
• Decide what content will be presented.
• Decide who will do each section of the content.
• Decide rehearsal date. Get all presenters’ agreement to attend.

Project 3 – People becoming customers and signing up for the business.

For Project 3 to occur, my consultants need to be trained to invite guests, gather customers and sign people up to the team.

• Set up six team calling dates to ensure 375 guests. If you want 250 people, one half or 125 are guests, and one out of 3 actually show up, you need 375 confirmed guests.
• After the first team calling event, do one hour training on how to customer gather at the event.
• After the second team calling event, do one hour of training on customer scripts of what to say to promote FREE energy.
• After the third team calling event, do one hour of customer gathering rehearsals.
• After the fourth team calling event, hand out customer signup forms, sales aids, and customer  agreements each needs to have at the event in case a computer is not available  Ensure they understand why each is necessary.
• After the fifth team calling event, have consultants team up and walk each through how to sign up a new consultant.
• Ensure each consultant knows to have customer signup forms,  sales aids and consultants agreements at the event AND knows how to properly sign up a new consultant.
• Plan a fun dinner after the sixth team calling event. Make it light and fun. Give awards for most dials, most appointments and most improved.

So what have we done so far? We’ve put our vision on paper. We’ve broken our vision down into three projects and broken each project down into doable tasks.

Getting Tasks Done – In Proper Sequence

This is a quality control check. The person who writes these projects and tasks does not have to do each of these items but should quality check each item to ensure it “looks” the way they have envisioned. You are the “visionary,” therefore hold the responsibility that everything occurs as you envisioned.

If during this step, you see a bunch of problems and it is not at all looking like you had envisioned it – DON’T THINK IT’S A DISASTER! Examine what specific thing isn’t working correctly and rewrite the project or the task to change its direction.

Reviewing Lessons Learned

Here is an example of reviewing lessons learned. Take out your project list and write down the lessons learned.

 

Project 1 Meeting Lessons 

• JW Marriott Hotel in the Galleria is very professional and is in a great location. Use them again. Build relationship with general manager; then negotiate a better rate.
• We need to warn guests of the $8 parking fee or give them an alternative to park at the diner across the street.

Project 2 Meeting Content Lessons

• Train John better on introductions. Specifically, he needs to look at the audience more and not bounce back and forth on his feet.
• Sue was great at each point of the presentation. Slide 7 has a typo in the headline.

Project 3 Customer/Signup Lessons

• Mark, Paul, Jane didn’t bring customer forms and FREE energy bills. Retrain them on why this is important.
• Too many no-shows. Drill confirmation script for next event.
• Chuck is a closing MASTER! Have him teach at the next team calling.

Use This Organization Structure for Anything

What I’ve just shared with you is completely scalable. This means that you can use the format for an in-home where you’re planning on having 10 of your best friends over. You could also use the same format to host 5,000 people at a regional event with speakers from the corporate office. You could use it to build a kitchen table or even to teach your children a foreign language.

The Missing Piece in Organization

If you ever find that you feel stuck, overwhelmed or you don’t want to do it anymore, the cause is normally that you’ve not broken the project down into small enough chunks yet. So make each task something you CAN do.

I hope you can see the value in what I’ve taught you in this post. Many leaders think that building their Ambit business is “event coordinating.” It’s not.

The missing piece is that the event coordinator’s job is to ensure the event goes well. The consultant in contrast, who puts on an event, must make sure the outcome goes well. The event coordinator’s job is Project 1 — only.

A consultant’s job is Project 1, 2, and 3. Many leaders miss this. They have events every week, sometimes twice a week and big events every month. But they never do 2 and 3.

Next Steps: Instantly access FREE First-Class Ambit training and to learn how you can grow your Ambit business and long-term residual income.

Spooky Time Thief No. 4 – Disorganization

Where does the time go? Is it spooky time thieves or is it a lack of something else? Over the next few days, we’re going to focus on who our time thieves are and how we can get rid of them once and for all.

Are you constantly losing your keys? Or is it your phone or glasses? Are you spending more time looking for your lead list than you are actually calling leads?

These are all symptoms of a spooky time thief known as disorganization. This thief is elusive and hard to catch, but when you do – it’s a huge plus for your life and your business.

The biggest obstacle for disorganization is where to start. Some of you probably have a shelf of books on how to organize your life and business. You’ve tried the “systems” or even enlisted some help. And it probably works for a while. Until you get sick or take a break. Or get tired of being organized.

Being organized doesn’t have to be that hard. You also don’t have to organize everything in one day.

In a recent post, I gave you my system for organization. You can use it for everything from organizing your cleaning list to your business project list. In this article, I give you a map for how to break projects into manageable tasks in four steps. Here are the overall steps (read the post for details):

1. Start with seeing or visualizing the desired outcome before it occurs.
2. Predict or estimate what needs to be done in order for the outcome to occur.
3. See that each item that needs to get done does get done and in proper sequence.
4. Write lessons learned so that you improve.

When you structure your projects like this, you’ll find more organization because you know the outcomes and you’re tracking it every step of the way. And you’re training yourself to be even more organized when you review the lessons learned.

But what do you do about the lost items? The searching for this or that?  I recommend that your first project be – get personally organized and use these four steps to do it. Take it room by room or start in your workspace.

Action Item: Capture this spooky time thief with the Performance Tracker and you’ll really start to see results in your business.

Spooky Time Thief No. 3 – Procrastination

Where does the time go? Is it spooky time thieves or is it a lack of something else? Over the next few days, we’re going to focus on who our time thieves are and how we can get rid of them once and for all.

Everyone knows the danger of procrastination, and it can really steal your time. Putting off what you can do today until tomorrow is sometimes necessary, but it also creates stress and a pile of to-do items.

The result of this time thief is often inaction. Why? When you procrastinate, you get to a point of not knowing what to do next. Or you get in a pattern of only doing the tasks that you enjoy.

Then, you get stuck wondering why your Ambit business is stuck.

The solution to procrastination? A list of activities broken down into tasks with an outcome.

Action Item: For more training on this, I recommend you check out Performance Tracker. It will help you break down your activities and track your progress. It may be just the thing you need to capture this spooky time thief once and for all.

How to Salvage a Scattered Day When You Work Your Ambit Business

Ever felt like you started your week late? Or a hurricane named Sandy gets in the way? You know the days. You don’t have your ducks in a row and everything is Manic Monday. Remember that song from the Bangles?

The laundry’s not done. The dishes are piling up. And you have this Ambit business that needs your attention, but all these distractions are adding up. How do you clear up the mind clutter and get on with your day and business?

How to Salvage a Scattered Day

This plan is for salvaging the days when nothing starts off right. If most days start off like this, you’ll need to spend a few days really focusing on where your time is going. Maybe you really do just have too much to do and need to let a few things go. I recommend you read my free report How to Build a Huge Ambit Organization Part Time for more help on this.

Here are three steps to getting your day back after it gets off track. I do recommend that you feed anyone (including yourself) and get any kids off to school before you tackle this exercise. You’ll need just 15-20 minutes to save your day.

1. Take five minutes to review your daily schedule. You do have one of these, right? If you don’t, you need to start one. Map your day in 30-minute increments and put in the big rocks (or big tasks) you need to accomplish. Don’t try to do them all at once. Schedule a time to promote your business, a time for admin work and a time for talking with your team, etc. You can see how to do this in this previous post – Get Off to a Great Start with Your Business. 
   
   If you don’t have a schedule, spend five minutes filling out this free template (PDF file)  to plug in all your must-do activities. Add in everything –personal care, exercise, kids’ homework and playtime, meals and meal prep, phone calls, etc. You can get a much more detailed one in Performance Tracker that helps you track your business activities in more detail.
    
2. Set 1-3 priority goals for the day. These are the things you have to get done. Everything else doesn’t get a priority. Put these on the top of your schedule. 
   
   
3. Write down a reward for the end of the day. Maybe it’s a relaxing bubble bath while Dad reads a bedtime story. Maybe it’s a chapter of that new mystery book you’ve been dying to read. Whatever it is, write it down on your schedule. Nothing helps you stay on track more than a reward at the end of the day.

Your Turn

What do you do when your day starts off all wrong? Share your tips in the comments below. 

Daily Motivation: Get Over the Fear Already

One of the most common problems in the Ambit Business is thinking about what other people think of you.

I call this introverting – or focusing on what’s going on inside your head instead of focusing on helping your prospect. Before I tell you how to overcome one of the most common hurdles to your success, I want to remind you of why this business works.

The only way this business works is to get focused on helping people discover their needs, wants and don’t wants and a solution for these – whether it’s with our service or a business opportunity.

As we discuss in our Ambit Pro Inviter Series, it’s not about you; it’s about helping someone else. When you are nervous, sweating and talking with a shaky voice, you’re projecting the “I’m not confident” in my product, in my ability to help you or in my opportunity vibe. Why would your prospect have confidence in the product/business if you don’t?

Now, that we’re past that, let’s get you past the worry of how you sound or look to your prospect:

1. Drill – This means to repeat what you’re going to say over and over BEFORE you get in front of a live person.
2. Focus all of your attention on the prospect.
3. Create so much activity that you don’t have time to focus on your fears.

Action Item: Rinse and repeat the Drill, Focus, Create Activity steps until you no longer fear what you sound like or look like. This will come with practice and you’ll be surprised at how quickly it happens.

Expert Angle: In the Moment Tips for Overcoming Scattered Thinking

It’s easy for a day to get derailed from time-to-time and this previous post can help you save that day. But what do you do when your mind starts to drift? What do you do when you just can’t find the motivation to keep your focus on what you need to be doing?

I personally believe developing focus is harder than dieting. And all the distractions we have with texts, emails, Facebook, organizing your leads, cleaning that imaginary layer of dust off your desk can make your mind stray in no time.

What is Scattered Thinking?

I’m known to say “What was I saying?” or to lie in bed wondering about 27 things in the span of two minutes.

But the work I do is very focused work. As is what you do – you’re talking to people, helping your team achieve their goals, juggling different prospects at different stages of the Inviting Formula.

You probably have at least 53 thoughts going through your head in any quiet two minutes you can find.

How to End the Scatter

So, what do you do with all this scatter? How do you get back to focused and results-driven work? Here are a few tips on getting past the scattered thinking in just a few minutes.

1. Whatever you do – don’t check your email. A study conducted by the U.S. Army and the University of California Irvine shows that when you check your email a few bad things happen: You change screens twice as often; you stay in a “high alert” state and your heart rate is more constant (not a good thing). Another study shows that checking email all the time is more damaging to your brain than smoking marijuana. So, if you want to get back to sharp, focused thinking – skip the inbox. The best way to deal with email – schedule two or three email sessions a day. 
2. Don’t go to Twitter or Facebook, either. I recently went on a Facebook diet. It had to be done. Anytime I had to wait three seconds for something, I popped over to Facebook to see what was going on. So, I started only checking Facebook on my phone, which I keep in another room when I’m working. Try it for a week. You’ll have much more fun liking pictures and posts when you get a page full than when there’s just one new update. Plus, you’ll strengthen your focus.
3. Spend a few minutes with your goals and accomplishments. Sometimes scattered thinking comes into play when we’re not crystal clear on why we’re doing what we’re doing. You can get a second wind when you spend a few minutes focusing on what you want to achieve. Another trick that works is to write down a few things you’ve accomplished. Being hard on yourself will only lead to further procrastination.
4. Keep a running list of what you’re thankful for. When you start to feel your blood boiling and that out-of-control feeling, it’s a good time to take a quick second to revisit all that’s good in your life. Your spouse. Your kids. A car that runs. Food on the table. A desire to do something better for your family and yourself (meaning your business). Good friends. 
5. Get everything out of your head. This is an old writer’s trick for curing writer’s block. But it’s also a great trick for anyone who can’t get started or focused on their task at hand. David Allen wrote a great book about it called Getting Things Done. But the premise is simple – write down everything that’s worrying you, bothering you or needs to be done. Take 10 minutes and get it on paper. Then, prioritize your list.

Want more help for getting focused? My mentor is the master of getting great at one thing and developed three great training that I learned and have provided below to help you focus on your Ambit business and achieve success:

• Performance Tracker – Helps you break down your Ambit Business activities into easy, manageable actions.
• Non-Fluff Goal Training – This no-nonsense training helps you properly define and set your income goals and your time freedom goals.
• Build It Big – A road-map for building your business step-by-step from the ground up.

Your Turn

Tell us your strategy for getting your mind back on your business in the comments below. 

Daily Motivation: Spooky Time Thief No. 2 – Constant Interruptions

Do you ever feel haunted by time? Or the lack thereof? Picture this.

Where does the time go? Is it spooky time thieves or is it a lack of something else? Over the next few days, we’re going to focus on who our time thieves are and how we can get rid of them once and for all.

It’s been said that this business is family-friendly and on your own terms. While that’s true, it’s important to minimize the interruptions in your work time, so that you can accomplish your goals.

If you read my post on how to Get Off to a Fast Start in Your Business, you know I’m a proponent of building in time for your family and having a plan for them as well.

If you find your family or friends are constantly interrupting your work, it’s time to set some boundaries and enlist some help, especially if you have small children.

Here are a few tips for working around a family that interrupts:

1. Set clear work times with older kids and other family members. Alert them ahead of time.
2. Define an appropriate interruption with older kids and family.
3. Set a time for your older kids and family members to check in with you when you’re working.

Consultants with smaller children:

1. Give the kids an activity to do before you start calls or admin tasks.
2. Bring in a sitter once a week to make sure you have focused time.
3. Break your work time into smaller segments – 10 to 15 minutes, instead of 30 to an hour.
4. Work when kids play or sleep.

These tips are simple in theory, but they do work better when everyone knows what to expect and there’s a routine in place. They also work best when you commit to your schedule and do what you say you’re going to do when you say it. If you tell the kids dinner is at 6, dinner needs to be at 6.

What about friends?

If working this business is the most important priority (outside your family), your friendships can still be part of your life. But you have to set boundaries on your time. Set aside a time in your schedule for calling friends back, responding to texts and social networking. Also, set aside time each week (or whenever you can fit it in) to spend time with your friends.

Think of your Ambit business much like a job that can’t be interrupted – waiting tables, nursing, teaching. Those professionals can’t be interrupted (except for emergencies) because they are directly responsible for taking care of people. You are too. 

Get Off to a Fast Start in Your Ambit Business

Stacy B. submitted this question:

I seem to be getting off to a slow start. I call leads as I should but haven’t had anyone sign up yet. I juggle work and a family and only have part time right now for my business.

I need a game plan on how to better manage my schedule and make calls without taking too much time away from my family.

It seems there isn’t enough time in my day. I feel that I’m not doing enough for my business. I want to feel a sense of accomplishment without feeling too overwhelmed. What do you suggest?

Thank you for your question, Stacy. I understand it well.

If you don’t already have it, I suggest you get a copy of my free report, “How to Build a Huge Ambit Business Working Part-Time.”

You see, I know your situation quite well as I started part-time while I was running my accounting & financial planning firm.

Part-Time Can Be Difficult

In addition to what is in that report, I’m going to give you an extra way to view your business. Next, I’ll give you a game plan and will conclude with how to fit it all in your day.

Before you started your Ambit business, your day was probably already “full.” Then, you added building a business into that already full schedule. So of course you will feel even more busy and unorganized. The first thing to understand is this is normal to feel this scattered feeling.

An odd thing that I’ve experienced is that I normally will – eventually – raise my productivity level to meet my obligations – no matter what. The reason I emphasize eventually is because in the beginning there is a lot of activity that isn’t focused – therefore there are a lot of unnecessary actions that are wasted. And perhaps there are necessary actions that could become more focused.

A new person has to learn what actions are the most important actions to accomplish before they can ever become efficient. So hopefully, the game plan I will give you below will help you see which actions are most important.

Your Game Plan

Here are the steps to finding which actions are most important for you to become efficient. 

1. Set your goals. 

The worst confusions and wasted actions come from not being fully decisive about what you want to accomplish and why you want it. Make sure you’ve written it out exactly. Picture a water faucet that is dripping – that symbolizes indecision. It’s not really on and not really off. It’s trying to do both. You can’t be all on until you’ve made that decision.

2. Self Training

No one comes into this industry fully knowing how to do each part of it. There are things they must learn. So spend some time daily learning the right way to build your business. You need to train yourself on Ambit, our service, the MLM industry and how to communicate effectively with people.

3. Promotion

No one knows about your business until you tell them. You must promote and make it known. How? Well, any way that communication can be delivered! Ads, purchased leads, calling people you know, etc.

The Rest of the List

4. Dial the phone

5. Connect with a prospect

6. Set an appointment

7. Do a presentation

8. Get a customer

9. Get a consultant

10. Train a consultant

What do you train a consultant to do? Start at #1.

These are the necessary actions for you to do and to learn to do very well. Anything not on the above list is probably not going to contribute to growing your business, therefore would be wasted action.

Priorities

If I were to isolate out the MOST important actions, I would pick:

1. Learn to invite your prospect very well. You will waste enormous time and expense until you do. Learn how here.
2. Dial the phone 30 times a day (if you’re part-time). By listening to the live calls in our Ambit Pro Inviter Series, you will “hear” how the call is supposed to go. But hearing them being done is very different than hearing yourself do it!

So spend a week or less listening to the calls, and then start dialing the phone and talking with prospects.

After a week of dialing, go back and listen to Ambit Pro Inviter Series again and you’ll hear things you didn’t hear the first time. Keep doing those two things until you are CERTAIN in your ability to talk to prospects. By then, you’ll be training your new consultants – and that’s what this business is all about.

This entire game plan is laid out in a daily to-do list called Performance Tracker.

Track Your Hours

Take a piece of paper and write the hours that you are awake in a column down the left side of the page. It would look something like this:

7 a.m. 
8 a.m.
9 a.m.
Etc.

Once completed, go back and create a daily “routine.”
7 am – rise, exercise
8 am – breakfast, get kids ready for school
9 am – leave for work, listen to training audios
12pm – make 5-10 prospecting calls
—
4 pm – Greet kids home, discuss their day
5 pm – make 5-10 prospecting calls
6 pm – dinner
7 pm – 5-10 prospecting calls
8 pm – help kids with homework and getting to bed
9 pm – do training calls with downline
10 pm – bed

Kids work great on a routine – if you keep your commitment with them. If you say, “I’ll be in to help you with your homework at 8,” be there at 8.

Don’t Forget Playtime

Now, make sure you schedule in weekend activities with the family (going to the beach, camping, board games, etc.). This way you don’t get the feeling that you’re never spending quality time with your family. It’s also why your family will let you work the business during the week.

Keep in the forefront of your mind that you’re investing your time so that you can have a lifetime of income. 

Non Fluff Goal Training

I was recently quoted as saying, “If you look upline for a training system that works and everyone you talk to is focused on personal development stuff; they’re not in the trenches – so you’ll have to create your own training system.”

Yep, I said that.

And I still say that. Some people misrepresented my meaning. I never said GOALS and how to achieve them wasn’t important. Goals are everything. Without them, Earth as we know it wouldn’t exist. What I was referring to was that when a trainer doesn’t know what to do to produce consistent results or how to train that which produces consistent results, the trainers often use inspiration instead of training. They’ll use phrases like:

“Just do it.”

“If you want it bad enough, you will do whatever it takes.”

“Pretend your baby girl is hanging off a cliff about to fall to her death. She will be saved only if you find 3 new distributors before the 30th of the month. Would you find the 3 distributors?”

“What the mind can conceive, the body will achieve and beyond.”

When Inspiration Is Valuable

There have been times when phrases such as those have been valuable to my mentor. The last phrase mentioned was printed on the t-shirts of all the men struggling through the U.S. Navy dive school with my mentor. There were times when he couldn’t imagine running another foot, or swimming another stroke, and then he would look at the guy in front of him and read his t-shirt “What the mind can conceive the body will achieve and beyond.” He would muster up a little more courage to complete that foot! So that statement was (and still is) valuable to him.

Inspiration Doesn’t Take the Place of Training

Having to push himself to run or swim another mile (or ten) didn’t require a new knowledge. It required continuing to use the knowledge he had already been trained to do. That is where inspiration comes in. But inspiration meant to supplant* training doesn’t work. If he didn’t know how to swim and instead of teaching him how to swim, you said, “Just do it.” That would be of no help to him whatsoever – especially if you continually watched him struggling!

With that fully understood, being able to:

• Correctly set a goal (so you don’t chase something you don’t really want)
• Correctly plan for that goal
• Correctly break that plan into projects
• Correctly break those projects into tasks
• Correctly reorganize your life so that you actually do those tasks

…determines whether you float through life like a jellyfish (which has no ability to propel itself) totally dependent on the currents of the water – or YOU DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT and get it.

Training Helps You Achieve Time & Again

Then, you decide on another thing you want and get that. And decide on another thing you want, and get that too.

You repeat that cycle over and over getting the things you want.

After that, keep doing the cycle, but now stretch your goal a little further outside of yourself and help other people and the environment.

That is how you too will be one who made Earth a better place.

You are as valuable to Earth as you contribute to it. Otherwise, you are a liability to Earth.

Next Steps: Want to learn more about how training is different from inspiration? Check out the bonus conference call by Clicking This Link.

Spooky Time Thief No. 1 – Unclear Goals

Do you ever feel haunted by time? Or the lack thereof? Picture this.

You’re sitting at your desk, looking at your to-do list wondering what you actually accomplished today. Or you’re sitting in traffic wondering whether that prospect you met with last week has watched the DVD you sent her two weeks ago? You meant to follow up sooner, but you just didn’t have the time.

Where does the time go? Is it a spooky time thief or is it a lack of something else? Over the next few days, we’re going to focus on who our time thieves are and how we can get rid of them once and for all.

If you don’t know what you want from your time and business, how can you choose to spend your time? If you’re finding your time thieved away, it’s a good idea to go back to your goals and get crystal clear on what you want. 

Action Item: Get clear on your goals for better time management and Ambit success. Check out Non-Fluff Goal Training if you need help setting your goals. 

How to Get You and Your Downline Over Call Reluctance

One of the requests I get often from Consultants is how to get over call reluctance. This is an essential step in your Ambit training and that’s the focus of today’s blog.

Consultants know that you have to make calls in order to build your Ambit business, but sometimes they are resistant to making the calls. Instead of making calls, they bury themselves in a guilt-ridden corner and mentally beat themselves up.

Sound familiar? Here’s a list of items I use to help coach my  downline members who struggle with picking up the phone and calling prospects.

What’s Behind the Reluctance?

Call reluctance is a term used in sales and network marketing to mean that the salesperson or the network marketer hesitates or procrastinates making calls to prospects. So, to help a person get past this we need to figure out what caused this reluctance.

As I commonly do, I’ll define the main word which is reluctance. It means unwillingness; offering resistance; opposing.

A Consultants knows he/she should make calls in order to build his/her business but is unwilling to or is resistant to or is opposed to making the calls. So, just what might cause a person to be unwilling to make calls?

The Reluctance Checklist

I’ve written a list of items that cause a person to be unwilling, resistant or opposed to making the calls. This will be a good checklist to help a person in your downline find out why they’re not having success in their Ambit business.

And, if you’d like a nice jolt of reality, hand this list to someone in your downline and ask them to check and make sure you do all these things.

1. Has he/she decided exactly what she wants to achieve with him/her Ambit business? Ask him/her what it is.
2. Has he/she written a plan of how to achieve it? Ask him/her if you can see it.
3. Is he/she working that plan? Ask him/her to show you where she currently is on the plan.
4. Does he/she know all the parts that make up building his/her Ambit business?
5. Does he/she have an lead source? Ask him/her to show it to you.
6. Does he/she know how to get customers? Ask him/her to get one while you watch.
7. Does he/she know how to service customers? Ask him/her to show you how he/she does it.
8. Does he/she know how to get consultants? Ask him/her to show you how he/she gets one.
9. Does he/she know how to train consultants to get customers? Ask him/her to train one while you watch, or introduce someone to you who he/she has trained that can get customers. Ask that person to demonstrate getting a customer.
10. Does he/she know how to train consultants to get consultants? Ask him/her to train one while you watch, or introduce someone to you who he/she has trained that can get consultants. Ask that person to demonstrate how they get a consultant.

Whatever he/she can’t show you is the reason for call reluctance.

Being afraid of rejection is garbage. Anyone who says that that is their reason, you can easily call their bluff by setting an audio recorder on a table and ask, “Invite me to come to your business meeting.”

They can’t do it. Why? It’s not fear of rejection. Audio recorders don’t reject you.

Fear of rejection, out of comfort zone, call reluctance – these are all fancy phrases a person comes up with to mask what they don’t know how to do. I don’t care if the person has been in sales for 20 year. If they don’t make the calls, it’s because there is something about the business they don’t know how to do.

The Difference in Call Reluctance & Real Fear

Fear, fear of rejection, and/or call reluctance is the same animal not being able to predict an outcome. That’s the basis of all fear. The person just simply can’t predict what will happen if they do something. If you go bungee jumping, it’s the inability to predict the outcome that causes fear. If you defuse bombs (my past profession), it’s the inability to predict the outcome that causes fear.

Don’t Buy the Excuses

I’ve seen this surface from some very unlikely people. My Mentor told me about a person who had seen a fair amount of success but was not able to reap the rewards from one of her MLM business legs. The compensation plan required her to have 12 on her front line to earn on the depth of the organization.

When she first came into the business, she had a friend with her and her friend saw the business at the same time. Her friend built a big network marketing business under her. So she had one very large organization, but she could only earn on one level deep.

When she had 12 on her front line, she could earn six levels deep of the whole organization. But she couldn’t get the other 11 people. Everyone in the company (not just her downline) looked up to her because she had such a large business.

But she couldn’t earn money on all the volume until she got those 11 people on her front line. She talked to him about it. She said she wasn’t making the calls because of call reluctance. He didn’t buy her excuse.

Don’t you buy your downline’s excuses run them through the check sheet above and train them on whatever they can’t do.

Don’t you buy your own excuses! Get trained with proper and proven Ambit training.