Attract: You Are The Difference

The essence of client attraction and creation starts with you and what you are thinking at any given moment. To demonstrate, let me ask you to imagine the following scenario. You are attending a gala event, such as this, and the room is filled with high quality prospects. As you observe all this world-class talent, people that you would love to meet and talk with, someone engages you in conversation and eventually they ask the inevitable question, “What do you do?” Four little words with such huge implications, what do you do? What are they really asking you at this critical point? They are not asking you to throw a label on the table, but what they are really asking is “Who are you and why should I consider working with you?” Here is an important point to remember about responding to that question. Men will give you 33 seconds to respond in a way that connects with them. Women, on the other hand, will give you 17 seconds. It’s like men have dial-up and women have DSL connections.
So, here you are in the scenario, you get to meet somebody, they come up to you and ask you what you do. How do you feel about the way you would answer that question right now? What are the consequences to you if you cannot answer that question with impact? Because if you don’t think that you’re good enough or interesting enough, it’s going to be very difficult to convince that person otherwise. Would you agree? Your self-perception drives your behavior. Your actions are a result of your thoughts. If your thoughts are not linked to a sense of clarity and confidence, but instead are linked to confusion and chaos, that will be the ultimate result you will have.

You can see this all the time. Observe any two people in their career and notice the difference between a producer who consistently performs at the top, year in, year out, and another producer who is struggling, with fits and starts. Intuitively you observe that they both have similar intelligence and resources. They are both provided with the same work environment and doing the same thing, this thing called financial rep’ing. What causes the disparity in their actual behavior? May I suggest to you that the one top performer, and all top performers, are using something that I call The Authentic Mindset. They have gone deeper and done the pick and shovel work of self-recollection. They are very clear when they become engaged in that situation. They are very clear of who they are and confident of what they will and will not do. They are capable of putting together the necessary efforts, of aligning their intentions and actions, to produce the results that will have an impact on somebody.

Let me tell you how this happened to me, where it started to unfold, and how I came to this understanding, because I am not a rocket scientist. In 1976, I began my sales career with a company called Lanier. I was hired and recruited like most new, young professionals, 24 years old, and without a clear understanding of who I was, what I would do and how I would do it. Inevitably what happened was my growth strategy was simply to turn my will over to someone else and say, “What should I think, how should I say it and how should I act?” My empowerment strategy was that I would simply imitate the actions of other people I viewed as successful. That is basically how I began my career.

I will share with you an experience when I was not being clear, competent and capable. In the 70’s, I was being taught to engage people through a very limiting, exploiting and manipulative process. The belief that I grew up with in the business was get the check, no matter what, even if it has blood all over it, get the check. This was the track, the check justifies the means. I have to tell you, I was out of alignment with this. It didn’t feel very good, but nonetheless this is how I was taught. So, I remember this one guy who was pretty successful telling us about how he conducts meetings and gets checks from people. He gave us all these exploitative concepts and strategies and, quite frankly, I left this meeting feeling sick. With my stomach doing a flip, I went off to my own meeting in downtown Chicago. I was a young kid with my briefcase and dictation equipment and I show up in this very successful attorney’s office – a big, beautiful, opulent office with a large man, kind of Kojak-looking, big and bald. As I’m demonstrating my product, about a minute or two into the demonstration, he began making hand signals to me. I became a little uncomfortable, stopped the demonstration, and said, “Excuse me, sir, is there something wrong?” He said, “Your hair piece, where did you get your hair piece?”

This was a very unusual conversation and I said, “Sir, it’s really my hair, I am Italian and I am just blessed with a good head of hair.” The man said, “I’m in the market for a hair piece and it really looks like a great one, where did you get it?” As I continued to say that honestly, it was my hair, he said, “Boy, that looks like great quality, may I touch it?” Now I have never heard this objection in any sales training manual before, but my belief was to get the check, the check justifies the means, and since things were hurting cash flow-wise, it all started to spin down. So I got a little creative and said, “I’ll tell you what, if I let you touch it, will you buy the machine?” He sat there looking at me and then said, “Yeah”. I leaned over this guy’s desk and he proceeded to yank on my hair for the next fifteen-twenty seconds. He pulled on my hair exclaiming, “I can’t believe the quality, this is amazing”, as he continued to insist that it was a hairpiece. About twenty seconds later, I pulled back from his desk, looking a little like Don King, calmly opened my briefcase and pulled out the order form. I put the form in front of him and said, “If I may have your endorsement, I will have your machine here tomorrow” and he signed the form.

When I went back to the office, the person who had advised me said, “Well, did you get the check?” to which I said, “I sure did”. He asked if I did what he had told me to do. I said, “No, I used a new strategy called the ‘Lou Do’.” I tell you this story with a lot of humility and transparency to share what I learned from this. The whole experience helped me change the way I look at this whole thing called ‘selling’ and I learned some very valuable lessons. The first thing was to acknowledge do and how I would do it. Inevitably what happened was my growth strategy was simply to turn my will over to someone else and say, “What should I think, how should I say it and how should I act?” My empowerment strategy was that I would simply imitate the actions of other people I viewed as successful. That is basically how I began my career.

I will share with you an experience when I was not being clear, competent and capable. In the 70’s, I was being taught to engage people through a very limiting, exploiting and manipulative process. The belief that I grew up with in the business was get the check, no matter what, even if it has blood all over it, get the check. This was the track, the check justifies the means. I have to tell you, I was out of alignment with this. It didn’t feel very good, but nonetheless this is how I was taught.
So, I remember this one guy who was pretty successful telling us about how he conducts meetings and gets checks from people. He gave us all these exploitive concepts and strategies and, quite frankly, I left this meeting feeling sick. With my stomach doing a flip, I went off to my own meeting in downtown Chicago. I was a young kid with my briefcase and dictation equipment and I show up in this very successful attorney’s office – a big, beautiful, opulent office with a large man, kind of Kojak-looking, big and bald. As I’m demonstrating my product, about a minute or two into the demonstration, he began making hand signals to me. I became a little uncomfortable, stopped the demonstration, and said, “Excuse me, sir, is there something wrong?” He said, “Your hair piece, where did you get your hair piece?”
This was a very unusual conversation and I said, “Sir, it’s really my hair, I am Italian and I am just blessed with a good head of hair.” The man said, “I’m in the market for a hair piece and it really looks like a great one, where did you get it?” As I continued to say
that honestly, it was my hair, he said, “Boy, that looks like great quality, may I touch it?” Now I have never heard this objection in any sales training manual before, but my belief was to get the check, the check justifies the means, and since things were hurting cash flow-wise, it all started to spin down. So I got a little creative and said, “I’ll tell you what, if I let you touch it, will you buy the machine?” He sat there looking at me and then said, “Yeah”. I leaned over this guy’s desk and he proceeded to yank on my hair for the next fifteen-twenty seconds. He pulled on my hair exclaiming, “I can’t believe the quality, this is amazing”, as he continued to insist that it was that something was not working real well here. Being a John Wayne fan when I was a kid, I learned that when your horse dies, get off. It also taught me that imitation is extremely dangerous. What works for someone else does not necessarily work for everyone. Unless you understand the principles and patterns that produce a certain result, imitation for the sake of imitation is not going to stand the test of time.

But it really taught me something even more important. You have to have your own house in order when you show up in somebody’s life because if you do not, what ultimately happens is you show up with a hidden agenda. I had to connect with the fact that, like a lot of people, I was anxious to improve my circumstances, but I was not necessarily willing to improve myself. I also learned that at the end of the day, rather than being upset with my managers and this potential client, I could thank them instead for providing this opportunity for me to see in a different way. They brought to my attention the very thing I needed to learn at that time and helped me to center on what was the most important lesson at that young age. I developed my first real, true, authentic intention in my life, a powerful intention, that to this day serves me in everything I do. That intention was to be a first rate version of myself rather that a second rate version of somebody else. That was the lesson I took away from that experience. One of the biggest insights I developed is to pay attention to the fact that all relationships are a reflection of the one you have with yourself at any given time. If you show up in somebody’s life and you are confused, or lack confidence, who will be attracted to you? Only people who are confused and lack confidence. Think about it, these people were just being mirrors to me.

I developed my first Focus Formula as a way to pay attention to how I observed certain things. It has four steps: look, see, tell the truth, take an authentic action. The first thing I did was look at my relationships and put my attention on them. What did I need to learn? I needed to learn how to relate to people, not how to sell them. I saw that as being far more beneficial to learn to do. The next thing I learned how to do was see, see it for what it was, examine my beliefs and behavior and identify the common denominators of successful achievement. I started to pay attention and look at talented people, talk to them, observe how clarity, competence and capability drove their lives. Then I had to tell the truth. Well, that is not always easy, is it? Tell the truth, separate fact from fiction. Not be honest, which was my personal spin on the situation, but tell the truth, what was truly working and what was not, and come to the place of understanding to stop doing something and start doing something else.

Ultimately what I pulled out of that was the development of my first generation Personal Value Statement. That is the synthesis of information and experiences that understand when you are asking me what I do, you are really asking me is who I am. You would like me to articulate my values and qualities about myself. You are really asking me to share with you what actions I would competently take in your life. Ultimately, you are asking me how I would make you feel in our relationship, because as you remember, the whole relationship process comes down to the way people feel about something, not what they think about something.

So I developed my Personal Value Statement and now today when people say to me, “What do you do?”, I can look at them, put my eyes in their eyes, and say: “People work with me because of my passion, dedication and commitment to serve as a resource for their financial security. What this means is I show a genuine interest in helping you preserve and protect your lifestyle, assets and loved ones and share a process that aligns intentions with actions. The benefit is the confidence, contentment and significant peace of mind you will feel knowing that you have honored your agreements to the people that matter most to you.” You see, I can say that to anyone. I can put my eyes in their eyes and from my heart state my cause. I can say, here are my values and qualities, here is what I will do and here is how I would like you to feel in this relationship. The benefit of showing up in someone’s life with such clarity from the Personal Value Statement sets the intention of that meeting. It reminds me why I am there. More importantly, it not only reminds me of why I am there, but it also serves as an opportunity to promote and prospect myself. When I am milling about at a gathering and someone asks what I do, I say, “For 23 years I have been very blessed to be able to protect and preserve people’s lifestyles, assets and loved ones” and then I walk away.

It’s kind of nice to see who is engaged with that, wants to learn more, and is attracted to that statement rather than for me to chase them. I do not want to chase anybody, do you? Put your cause out there. I don’t think Martin Luther King needed a PowerPoint presentation to get people to align with his cause, did he? I don’t think Gandhi had to have a closing meeting with all his staff to get them to align with his principals, or that Mother Theresa took a professional development course in persuasion and negotiation to get people to line up with her. They had a strong sense of cause; they were clear, competent and capable as to why they showed up. Let’s take that as the baseline, the goldmine. Use the Personal Value Statement as the goldmine to keep yourself out of that 87% group. That is the tool to attract people to you.

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