On Sat. I was catching up with my girlfriend who lives in Savannah, GA. They really want to move and live in TN. They have had their home off and on the market for the past year and a half. They have listed with several different realtors, never really enamored with any one realtor.
There are over 500 homes for sale in her market, with about 20 homes in her immediate neighborhood and I don’t know how many in surrounding neighborhoods. They have a few things going for them with regards to their house, but they are trying to keep their house priced to where they will still make a little bit of profit.
After she was done telling me her latest realtor frustration, I said to her, you know, don’t fret about it. The day will come where you wake up and you’ll say, “that’s it, we’re moving, I’m done messing around.” You’ll slash the price of your home to an unbelievable selling price or you’ll go out and do something really unthinkable in terms of marketing and you’ll find a buyer and boom your house will be sold and you’ll be on your way to TN. Until that day, just relax and continue moving forward, but I promise you, one day, you’ll have had enough and you’ll draw your line in the sand and say “that’s it”. And you’ll take some action. That will be your defining moment.
The next morning, I was re-counting the conversation for my husband and he said to me, you know what, you’re on to something. He said people take action when they have their defining moment. Usually people take action when they are so totally fed up they can’t take it any more. It could be considered a break point. Some people take action when they are totally, 100% completely out of money. Some people take action just before they are out of money. Some people have to be so brutally beat up mentally before they break and take action to change their situation.
Everyone is different. Everyone has a different threshold of pain and therefore each person has his or her own moment in time when it comes time to drawing the line in the sand and saying, “that’s it, enough is enough!”
Very few people take action just because they want a bigger game or they want to capitalize on their existing success. There are many out there that do, but they are few & far between. Usually people take action when they are almost out of hope, or they are standing at the edge of a cliff and there’s no where else to go, except to do that one un-thinkable thing that will prevent them from going over the edge.
You have to get so fed up with your current situation that you just want out. No matter what other option you have, you are ready for Plan B. You are done and have had enough of Plan A. You are ready to put an end to your misery, or, maybe you aren’t miserable, but you just come home one day tired, worn out beyond belief, almost broken, feeling frustrated and you say to yourself, there just has to be a better way. I’m ready to take action for that better way.
If you’re still moving slow in your business, you just haven’t hit your breaking point yet. You haven’t drawn your line in the sand to say, “that’s it.” But I’m going to tell you another story that will perhaps have a profound effect on you.
I watched a movie Sunday Night called Company Men. Its a tale all too familiar in this economy. Thousands of people have been let go from their high paying jobs, while the elite company CEO and VPs enjoy new offices, lavish vacations and chunkey pay raises. They increased their stock shares through downsizing.
The lead character played by Ben Affleck, loses his job. He is offered the opportunity to work for his brother in law, who has a business building homes, but Ben feels he cannot stoop to manual labor. He continues his lifestyle of playing golf and driving his Porcshe, until one day, there is no money left. They end up selling the house, the car and letting go of the country club membership and with his tale between his legs, he goes to his brother in law and asks for a job. He has to move his wife and his two kids in to the home of his parents, which is beyond humiliation for him, but he does it.
Had Ben Affleck’s character had to get to the point of total loss and destruction before having his defining moment. Perhaps, had he started doing what was unthinkable to him – working for his brother-in-law immediately after losing his job – he would not have had to endure such losses. Perhaps he would have been able to re-build and re-create his life, with minimal effects on his family. But his defining moment didn’t come until all was lost.
There’s a show on Discovery Channel called Dual Survival, where two guys go out in the wilderness and show you how to survive in different situations. One guy, an ex Special Forces Army guy, drank some un-filtered water. He said, its better to be found & rescued, sick from drinking dirty water, than to be found dead because of de-hydration.
The other survival guru who does the show with him, was saying how bad it was to drink that water, elephants and hippos were going to the bathroom in it and when you’re sick, survival becomes even harder. As the show went on, they ended up not ever finding clean water nor finding a way to filter it, so the survival guru ended up drinking the water that he, before was so adamant about not drinking. He was pushed so far to the edge, that he needed water and you could tell on camera that he was really physically not doing well because of dehydration, while the other guy had more energy because he was staying hydrated even if it was from potentially infested water.
The point is that each person had their defining moment at different times. The one guy, didn’t wait for dehydration to set in. He drank the water, kept himself hydrated and pushed himself to get further and further along to be rescued. The 2nd guy, waited until the very last moments when he couldn’t stand it any more and then he drank the water.
I encourage you to take a look at your own lives and decide, how much do you have to lose, or how hard does life have to be, or how painful do things have to become before you have your defining moment.
This lesson toady about Defining Moments is not just told for your benefit, but as a leader, you have to realize that people are only moved to action when they draw their own lines in the sand, and not before.
As I said, there will be very few people who will want to play a bigger game and take action to capitalize on the success they already have. Those people do exist, but they are few and far between.
When you are talking to people, ask them – when do they really want to change their lives? Maybe they are getting by, existing, surviving, but will it take a tragedy to strike before they realize that merely surviving isn’t enough? What kind of life could you have, when you are not just surviving but thriving? What does a happy and thriving life look like?
Why wait? If you know about this thing called a Defining Moment, why not adjust your pain threshold to move you towards your Defining Moment even faster?
People who become Top Earners really quickly – they are not better than anyone else, they are just hungrier and realized their defining moment when they chose network marketing as their vehicle to a life of prosperity.
I have heard of these rock stars on speed, referred to as freaks of nature. I am here to tell you, they are not, they are just really really hungry and incredibly fed up with being hungry that they are moved to massive action. That’s it. Instead of contacting 100 people in 3 months, they contact 100 people in 10 days. That’s the difference between someone who wants it now, or someone who wants it later.
If you want to learn how to harness the power of the internet to really take massive action and get 100 people contacting you in mere days, make sure you grab your freebie copy of The 1% Club.
Tomorrow’s Blog Post will address the powerful things you can do when you fully understand the concept of the Defining Moment.