I think I have a genetic bias towards positivity, so yes I tend to stay positive during difficult situations. What helps me to stay positive is a simple idea: we don’t control life, we control how we react to it.
When we truly think about it, most things in life are out of our control. We don’t control the economy, we don’t control someone rear-ending us, we don’t control the weather. So if I have no say or control in it, I’m not going to let it get me down. Simple as that. Now I’m not perfect in that sense, but I generally live by this principle.
A leader’s positive attitude can have a positive impact both on their clients and their team.
As the leader goes, the team goes, the business goes. I believe business, teams, and the world rise and fall on leaders. So being a leader that is positive, that can hold the vision in front of him/her, even through tough times, is vital to the health of the organization, especially a network marketing business.
We can all agree 2020 was a monumental year for all of us. There were a lot of factors outside of our control. What was in our control was how we handled it. Our attitude. How we pivoted as people and as entrepreneurs. As a leader in our business, I looked at 2020 as an opportunity to either use the outside factors as an excuse or use them as guidance to pivot and adjust accordingly. We emphasized within our organization how everything that was happening in 2020 was hard, it was changed, but through it, we would grow.
We cast a vision. We stayed positive. We shut out negative noise (the news) and we held fast to the belief that if we kept going we would serve people and serve the world. 2020 was a year of explosive growth for us professionally and personally and while it certainly had its lows, it had more highs. And from a network marketing business standpoint as a direct sales organization, we had our best year yet. I attribute it to maintaining a positive attitude and a positive outlook that was contagious.
What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?
Now it’s not like I had a realization one day and went from a corporate employee to lifestyle entrepreneur overnight. There were years of developing myself into who I needed to be to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish as a network marketer. The only problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted to accomplish… until I was on a flight home from a business trip from New York to San Diego.
Side note, I had moved to Orange County with my wife where she was born and raised, and in that life-changing move, it opened my eyes even further to the fact that the people who had lives that I wanted to live were entrepreneurs and were making a difference through their work.
So on the flight, I was listening to a podcast “Entrepreneurs On Fire” and heard a guy named Nick Unsworth being interviewed. You know when you meet or hear someone and there’s this magnetic energy and you think “I’ve got to get to know this person”, I had that moment on the plane. Nick spoke life over me without even knowing it, he was a business coach. I looked him up and he happened to live in San Diego, where I was currently flying into. Interesting…And even more interesting, he happened to be putting on a 3-day conference — and I was landing just in time to catch the last day! I knew I needed to land and head straight to the conference and meet this Nick Unsworth guy. I landed, called Sandy, and told what I learned and that I was heading to this conference. Always supportive of me, she agreed it was a good idea. In attending, my suspicions were right! Nick was the man and I wanted him to coach me to do what he did: help people through the work that we call “life coaching” and “business coaching” today. I hired him on the spot (making by far the largest investment in myself aside from college) and told him “teach me how to do what you do.” I did a 6-month coaching program with Nick and his company Life On Fire and launched my own life coaching business in that time frame. I definitely did not feel ready yet and had a sense of “imposter syndrome,” but I jumped in.