Everything in your life is a trigger of some sort – the things you see, hear, feel, taste, read, and touch, the people you mix with, the places you go, the things you wear, what you eat and drink, your car, your home – everything is affecting you, whether you know it or not.

Peak performers carefully monitor their input, associations, diet, and environment. They control their self-talk, and set high standards for themselves.

Making the Right Adjustments

• You know how you feel if you wear dirty or creased clothes, if you don’t groom yourself well, if you spend time with losers, or if you don’t get enough exercise or sleep.
• And you know how you feel if you associate with winners, wear smart clothes, look your best, and go to top restaurants.

When you feel good about yourself, it’s because you have systematically created that situation, and you will achieve a lot more. Simply making the right adjustments in your life will go a long way to improving your self-esteem, and we earn money in direct proportion to our level of self-esteem.

How We Learn:

• Taste 1%
• Touch 1.5%
• Smell 3.5% (yet it is the most emotional sense)
• Hearing 11%
• SIGHT 85%!

Because visual triggers are so important (ask any advertiser), I designed a few triggers you might want to take advantage of.

Carefully Design Your Environment

My office is very carefully designed to visually trigger motivation, work, belief, optimism, feelings of well being and success, joy, and peace of mind.

I remove anything that has a negative trigger for me. Photographs of people who hurt me get removed and replaced.

Everywhere I look, I see multiple triggers.  I surround myself with:

• Gifts from people I like, respect, and love.
• Reminders of past victories.
• Reminders of future promises.
• Symbols of success and strength.

Our entire home is like that. Rika and I are careful about our triggers, and we’re highly disciplined. Cleanliness, orderliness, and high quality are important to us.

Do Some Spring-Cleaning

Take a good look at the triggers in your life, from people to things, and do some spring-cleaning. After all, it is spring, and every day is the first day of the rest of your life. Create an environment that makes you happy, healthy, and successful.

Think of a specific amount of money that would make a dramatic and exciting difference in your life.

Now imagine that you knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that you and your entire family would be tortured to death in a horrible manner (think of the movie, “Saw”) if you didn’t achieve that specific, exciting financial goal within exactly three months.

What would you do?

Could you achieve that goal?

Imagine your beloved kids having their podgy little paws severed, and you’ll quickly start making new choices. (Did that get your attention?)

More importantly:

• What would you do differently?
• What would you change?
• What would you stop doing?
• What would you start doing?
• Who would you call?
• What would you suddenly be prepared to do under those circumstances that you refuse to do now?

Most of us are too lazy, content, comfortable, and timid to do things outside of our comfort zone, and we allow our low self-esteem and fear of embarrassment to keep us from the wonderful achievements that we could accomplish.

It’s About Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

Instead of sending you to a shrink (who is usually even more screwed up than we are), putting you through a motivational seminar every morning of your life, or chasing you around with a large, spiky stick, I suggest the easier route is to take the time to imagine the terrible consequences of remaining in your comfortable little molehill of mellow, yellow mediocrity.

When you play this game, you start to see all sorts of real options you might not previously have had the guts to confront.

Is It You Can’t or You Won’t?

You see, our biggest barrier isn’t the fact that we can’t accomplish something, but rather the fact that we won’t, because of our fear of other people’s opinions. Scary, I know, but true. We don’t fear failure per se; we fear the reactions of others if we were to fail. “What would they say? I would feel so embarrassed!”

How much more embarrassed would you feel if you learned that you had six months to live (watch “Breaking Bad”), and you had been too bashful, self-absorbed, and apathetic to provide adequately for your family when you had the opportunity?

Try this one: Imagine you get hit by a heavy truck while meandering across a busy street in the rain, so you’re confined to a wheelchair and can’t speak, and your fifty-something, arthritic wife has to work as a shelf packer at Safeway in the day and a cleaner at MacDonald’s at night to support your pathetic asset? (Problem is, there are so many useless men already living off their wives…)

Consider Your Real Alternatives

Playing head games frees us up to consider our real alternatives, to weigh up our present use of time and resources, and to think outside the box. We need to mentally exceed our pain threshold in order to imagine the unimaginable.

Playing this “torturous consequences” game allows us to peek out from under our moldy old security blanket and realize that we’re using around 4% of our potential, and that the lies we’ve been telling ourselves about what we can’t do are really just self delusion.

Think of Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights”, when he convinced himself he was paralyzed – a hilarious hospital scene that has a serious ring of truth to it. We all suffer from self-deception. When he stuck a real knife into his thigh to prove his point to his friends, he had a painful awakening.

Make Your Excuse Irrelevant

Yes, you can achieve magnificent goals, and all the barriers are just in your head. DollarMakers teaches how you can achieve any financial goals with no cost or risk, so all those weak excuses are no longer relevant. If only you can believe it to be so. Hence the dramatic imagination game.

If you have a vivid imagination and take the time to really get yourself into this head game, you might be amazed at what you could accomplish. Suddenly, you would do things that you currently avoid like the proverbial plague, not because you can’t do them, but because you fear the opinions of people who really don’t give a damn, don’t care, don’t notice, and don’t matter.

Get over yourself, get over your mental barriers, and get down to the bank to cash in on your grossly underutilized potential. Some once said. “THINK and grow rich…”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery said:

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

The more exciting your goals and objectives, the more specific, the easier it is to handle the price you pay along the way.

Losers look at what they’re going THROUGH, while Champions look at what they’re going TO.

Part of the reason why people quit so easily is that they don’t believe in their own goals.

Here’s how to get very excited about your goals – it will fuel your enthusiasm and determination and make your journey infinitely easier by getting you to WANT to do what you have to do to get where you want to be.

Make an EMOTIONAL Commitment

Think of a goal. For example, let’s say your goal is to participate in the exciting DollarMakers International Convention in Cancun. Now it can be something that you rationally and intellectually commit to, and you might make a few random, lukewarm efforts to reach that goal.

Alternatively, you can make an emotional commitment, and that’s where you get the rocket fuel. Walt Disney said:

“If your heart is in your dreams, no request is too extreme, for when you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who you are!”

What would happen?

What would happen if you put up posters of Cancun around your home, visit websites about Cancun, ask Lynnette Peter, our DollarMakers Director for Travel and Conventions, about all the fun activities that will be available, discuss it with your family and friends, invite them to join you, visualize yourself riding a white horse on the beach, snorkeling among the multicolored fish, meeting the DollarMakers cream of the crop from all over the world, and having fun in the sun?

• Would you work harder to make it happen?
• Would you go out on a limb to spend time in paradise with the best of the best?
• What would the return on your investment be?

You don’t notice the shadows when you’re looking at the sun. Focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want.

4 Tips to Fuel Your Enthusiasm

1. Fill your mind with motivation and inspiration.
2. Associate with people who believe in you and in your dreams.
3. Work on your own personal development more than anything else.
4. Get excited about the details of your goals – the more specific, the more terrific. Smell them, taste them, visualize them, listen to them.

If your goal is a new red Cadillac STS, go and test drive one every single weekend… or at least sit in one. Smell it. Feel it. Imagine yourself driving it. Touch it. Put up pictures of it.

“Whatever the mind of man can believe and conceive, it can achieve”

- Napoleon Hill.

The rocky road will turn into silk and feathers when your objective is sufficiently brilliant and believable. Make it so.

Have you ever joined a health club or started a diet or exercise program, and given up after a short while? I have.

Muscle, Mind, and Motivation

I was once approached by a publisher friend to co-write a book with another friend, Lionel who was the country’s number one bodybuilder. The book was to be called, Muscle, Mind, and Motivation.

Lionel would write about health, exercise, and nutrition, and I would write about motivation and self improvement.

We would market the book through the eighteen health clubs that Lionel owned at the time and through my database and my talks and seminars – a lovely Joint Venture.

“I won’t start writing until you get into shape.”

We set up a lunch to agree on the terms. Lionel hadn’t seen me for a while, and when he did, he said, “Robin, I won’t start writing until you get into shape. You’re fat and unfit. Here is a Gold Membership Card to my Club. Come train with me, lose some fat, add some muscle, and then we’ll write the book.”

You Get Results Quicker When You Work with the Best.

I had been going to gym before in my life, but this was a new experience. When you train with the best in the country, it’s a whole new ball of wax, I assure you. I worked really hard and found out what makes a champion bodybuilder! I was in a bodybuilding Joint Venture with Lionel! I lost weight and fat, put on muscle faster than ever before, looked great, and we wrote the book, which was a roaring success.

The Best Laid Plans

The best kind of plans have three components:

1. You team up with champions, winners, and successful people only, not with undisciplined losers.
2. You both commit to a measurable, time-related, specific action plan that makes you both accountable for exact results.
3. You diligently and regularly monitor your progress and make adjustments as you go. And because you’re working with a champion, quitting is never even a consideration.

To this day, I remember the power of teaming up with champions, and I am privileged to know some real business champions with whom I Joint Venture.

I knew a jeweler who attended a Dale Carnegie management training program with me  and returned to his business a changed man.  Suddenly, mall security guards started arresting thieves in his store.

When he remarked to one of the security guards that it seemed that crime was increasing in the mall, the security replied that the crime rate hadn’t changed – the guards had simply started intervening and arresting thieves, whereas before, they had turned a blind eye. They were rewarding my friend for his change in attitude towards them. But I digress…

What REALLY Motivates Employees

In his book, “Persuasion IQ”, Kurt W. Mortensen discusses a working paper by Kenneth A. Kovack of George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. Kovack researched the differences between what motivates employees and what managers think motivates employees. Here’s the data:

What Motivates Employees as Ranked by Employees

1. Interesting work
2. Appreciation of work done
3. Being well informed
4. Job security
5. Compensation
6. Growth and promotion opportunities
7. Good working conditions
8. Personal loyalty to employees
9. Tactful discipline
10. Help with personal problems

What Motivates Employees as Ranked by Managers

1. Compensation
2. Job security
3. Growth and promotion opportunities
4. Good working conditions
5. Interesting work
6. Personal loyalty to employees
7. Tactful discipline
8. Appreciation of work done
9. Help with personal problems
10. Being well informed

“Shared Ownership”

One thing that I believe will cover many of these requirements is “Shared Ownership”. I’m not talking about giving your staff shares in your company.  I’m talking about profit-sharing Joint Ventures, where employees get compensated in direct proportion to the value they add as measured in profit.

Front line employees are often to privy to information of which management is blissfully unaware, and many times by design. Empowering your employees by partnering with them:

• gives them an “ownership mentality”.
• reduces absenteeism, laziness, and shoddy work.
• increasing motivation, loyalty, productivity, interest, enthusiasm, and innovation.

Managing the Potential Downside

Opening opportunities to your staff has its downside and risks, and therefore should be carefully managed, watched, and controlled, while allowing enough freedom and accepting enough damage through honest mistakes and inexperience to remove fear and hesitation.

Clearly defined boundaries, regular, open communication, and quick feedback, and awareness of the power of operant conditioning, with it’s requisite fast reinforcement, is essential.

As “partners” (without legal implications, please), most of the above motivational factors (we should also be cognizant of Hertzberg’s Hygiene Factors here) will be more than adequately addressed, indeed enhanced, and your bottom line will see the results.

In our society, people tend to blame their tools when they don’t succeed. Right, now, socialists and collectivists are blaming the bad economy on the capitalist system, which is ridiculous.

Losers blame the wind; winners adjust their sails.

You Gotta Have Staying Power

People who attend our Joint Venture Broker Bootcamps and don’t consistently implement the ideas and systems they learned, fail, and guess what? They blame the Bootcamp (and me.)

The fact that they don’t have the intelligence, or the motivation, or the staying power to persist until they succeed is too hard for them to accept, so they blame the system, while others, who attended the same Bootcamp, make a lot of money in the same economy with the same system, but with a different attitude.

Now’s the Perfect Time to Position Yourself!

The Joint Venture Broker systems we teach work, and we have abundant evidence to prove it. The capitalist system works, and just because some people abused it, doesn’t mean it isn’t still the best system in the world.

The looters and parasites will use the recession to try and undermine capitalism, redistribute wealth, and sabotage the success of the western world, but you can’t keep a good man down for long, and I have absolutely no doubt that the economy will rebound magnificently – the spring always follows the winter, and smart people will position themselves to take full advantage of this fact.

• Now is the time to become the best Joint Venture Broker you can be, because the world is full of great opportunities offered by this recession.
• Now is the time to grab hold of the opportunities available to you through DollarMakers and get wealthy.

Seize the day – the window of opportunity is wide open for capitalists who understand the power of Joint Ventures. DollarMakers is an idea whose time has come, and I invite you to join us as we ride this wonderful wave to Treasure Island.

Here’s a great book which I recommend:

“End of Prosperity – How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy -If We Let It Happen.”  by Steve Moore

“At a time when economies around the world are going wobbly, this insightful and timely book reminds us of the principles and the policies which America will need to employ to restore stability and prosperity.”

- Lady Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1979-1990

“Fair warning! No one can say, ‘No one told us this would happen.’ Art Laffer, Steve Moore, and Peter Tanous have done just that with this brilliantly insightful book. Read it — and act!”

- Steve Forbes

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
- Calvin Coolidge

You can’t teach someone persistence. People will become sufficiently persistent to succeed only when their desire for their goal exceeds the pain and discomfort they have to endure in order to reach it. It’s simply a matter of comparison: the pain of living without your objective has to exceed the pain of paying the price to accomplish that goal. Which pain is greater?

What’s Your Motivation Level

Everyone is motivated. Motivation means “A motive for action”. Some people are motivated to lie in the gutter with a cigarette and bottle of liquor. That’s what they want to do, that’s why they’re doing it. Others live mediocre lives, because they don’t want real success badly enough to pay the price to obtain it.

When Success is Guaranteed

How do we guarantee success? DESIRE. When you want something badly enough, when you are prepared to do whatever it takes to get it, you will become persistent. And when that happens, success is guaranteed.

When to Not Bother

On a scale of one to ten, one being “It doesn’t matter” and ten being “Nothing will stop me”, how badly do you want to reach your objective? If it’s anything less than a twelve, don’t bother. FIND something that you want more than anything else. That desire will burn away fear, slothfulness, excuses, lack of attention, distraction, compromise, mediocrity and even fatigue. People who are seriously motivated are persistent and dedicated. They set extremely high standards and will pay the price. They LOVE their objective.

Persistence is…

Persistence is the result of finding your true purpose and the result of persistence is massive success. To find your purpose, it’s good to spend time with others who already know what their purpose is. Those people will inspire you and their energy will start to invigorate you. You will seek what they have, which is purpose. And what you honestly and sincerely seek, you will surely find.

“They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigour.”

- Eric Hoffer

We are all leaders; in our families, churches, temples, lodges, clubs, businesses and fraternal organizations.

Manager vs. Leader

Have you ever heard of a Cult Manager? What about a Religious Manager. Of course not!  Yet, where have we ever seen more loyalty, commitment and blind obedience? They’re leaders and there’s a huge difference between management and leadership. “Semantics”, you say. Well, when I went to Hotel School and was taught how to be a Hotel Manager I found that I had to become a Leader in order to gain the loyalty and commitment of my staff.

How I Created Loyalty as My Staff Tested Me

When I first arrived to work as a manager in a hotel in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the staff did the usual hotel staff things to test me. The cashier would mix up the cash register, and see if I could sort out the problem. The night chefs would stay home, and see if I could handle the kitchen at night and prepare the breakfast. I had to prove myself. How does a manager cope with that, as opposed to a leader?

I was called in to a meeting of my management peers and they told me to fire a certain Functions Manager. He was a rebel and no good, they said. Lazy. Obstinate. Get rid of him!

His name was Oral and as I watched him at work I saw his staff of waiters set up the conferences and do all the work perfectly while he sat outside, smoking.

I called Oral into my office and fired him. Then I said, “Oral, I’ve done what everyone here wanted me to do. I fired you. Now, I’m rehiring you on my terms. Here are my terms: You can sit outside and smoke all day. You never have to enter the hotel. As long as the job gets done to my satisfaction, I’m happy. If not, we will talk.   How’s that?”  Oral beamed.

He thanked me profusely. He was happy. He did a great job. I was happy. And one day he saved me from being badly beaten up. Oral, you see, was a natural leader. He understood leadership.  Suffice is to say that after a while I had a loyal following instead of an obedient staff.

A Leader Understands

A leader understands that she is leading personalities with value systems, goals, fears, hopes and dreams. She knows that she can get people to work 24/7/365 when she pushes the right buttons. Never run, raise his voice or panic.

Creating Real Motivation

When I was 17 I was drafted into the army. I saw what leadership was and I saw what psychopaths did. The psychopathic, racist South African army officers got people to do things by force. They achieved very little. The true leaders in the army got a lot more done, without fear, manipulation or force. They got soldiers volunteering for things. When your people are motivated and have a vision and a goal, they will achieve their goals and your goals together. Without pay, if necessary. Financial rewards and incentives are not the most powerful there are.

Questions You Should Ask the People You Intend to Lead:

1. What is your greatest fear and your greatest dream? Why is that your fear? Why is that your dream?
2. If you had a million dollars and lots of time and energy, what would you be doing right now?
3. What feelings do you want to experience, and what feelings do you want to avoid in your life?
4. What’s the best book/movie you ever read/saw?
5. What are you most proud of about yourself? What is you greatest skill? What do you do best?
6. What are you weakest at?
7. If you could have any job, what would it be, and why?
8. What is your greatest worry?
9. How do you feel about…?
10. What would you change about this business/organization?

Ask open ended questions; draw them out. “Tell me more? What do you mean by that, exactly? Why do you say that? And? Yes?”

Characteristic of a Phenomenal Leader

The true leader knows that she has to know a lot about the people she wants to lead.

• Empathize and care.
• Show them how to measure their progress.
• Treat them fairly and be consistent in how you lead.  Regularity, honesty and consistency is important.
• And there must be clear guidelines, consequences and reasons for what happens. Everyone must understand why they are to do what they do, what the outcome is supposed to be, the consequences for failing to do the right thing and the BIG PICTURE. The vision, the overall strategy, should be understood by everyone concerned.
• Most of all, each team member should know that, by reaching the company or organization’s goals, they will reach their personal goals as well. They should have a vested interest in the success of the venture. This is vitally important.

Mortimer Adler was quoted in Time Magazine in 1974 as saying, “In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The pathos is his ability to touch feelings, to move people emotionally. The logos is his ability to give reasons for an action, to move people intellectually.”

Very few managers know how to lead. It’s never too late to change. Leaders are firm, flexible, value-driven and honest. They have Magnificent Obsessions, driving goals and clear action plans. Their followers feel loved, secure, cared for and lucky. Together, we can do amazing things.