Image courtesy of: http://littleportionhermitage.org

Good day everyone, I hope that you are all having a wonderful one. I have finished my first day of a great class on marketing and prospecting. I wanted to let you all in on some of the great tidbits I learned because they not only work for us in marketing, but it is also a great recipe for our lives in general.

The lesson was on bravery. From the time we are born, our parents do everything they can to protect us, to make sure that we are safe. The lesson that this teaching us is that the world is unsafe and that we need to be not take risks or put ourselves out there because we might get hurt. This is a wonderful lesson to learn when it comes to physical harm and death, but those situations are rare in our lives anymore. Yet our instincts still go overboard to try and assure our survival, going so far as to add dire consequences in our minds for actions that don’t actually have any real consequences, such as talking to strangers.

Here’s the thing, in each of these situations, we did something that took us outside the instinctual safe zone. We pushed past our fears to achieve something. Therefore, the key to making our lives the best that we can have is to reprogram our brains. We need to turn that instinctive wariness into an instinctual drive to push forward into those things that will make our lives better. The best way to make that change is through pain. Our brains are wired to avoid pain at all costs. We are special in that our willpower can overcome our built in programming.

The process of reprogramming can be simple and it is a technique that has been used for many changes in life for people, such as quitting smoking. That process is the inflict pain on ourselves when we don’t step outside our comfort zone. Easiest method is to put a rubber band on your wrist. Then, anytime you do not step out in a situation, you snap the rubber band. Eventually, your brain will program that being timid and not talking to people is a source of pain. This will make it simple and easy to talk to strangers, to get that prospect and to build the lives that we want.

Finally, here is another piece to this puzzle that will help. Change how you look at prospecting people. Do you believe that your product makes people’s lives better? I know that I do for my travel club. As such, if I don’t talk to someone about it, I am actively doing nothing to make their lives better. Doesn’t that make me, at best, apathetic and at worst malicious. That isn’t the person I want to be, so I need to get out there and make people’s lives better!

What habits do you want to form? What method are you going to use to make those changes? I look forward to your comments and trust that your day is getting better already!

~Dominic