- Antonio

The Chicken Or The Egg...?

So I was hosting a training call on Monday when someone asked me what I thought was a interesting/relevant question...

"Mike, which should someone concentrate on first... Personal development or marketing?"

To me, that's a bit like the chicken or the egg argument.

The bottom line is that you can't have success without both.

If you learn how to market and generate leads, you need to have personal confidence and leadership in order to pick up the phone and sponsor them.

If you have personal confidence and leadership, but lack the marketing skills to actually generate your leads, you're stuck with an empty list to call.

So you need both, but which do you pursue first?

Well the simple solution that you SHOULD follow, is to study both.

But if you could only pick one, personally I'd choose marketing.

Why?

Good question.

Without doubt, the fastest and most effective way to gain a skill or go through a personal evolution, is by "doing the thing".

Not just by listening to a tape or reading, but by taking the lessons from those sources and then doing them.

You'll learn more about prospecting by calling 300 leads than you ever would by just reading.

Books and CD's can cut down learning curves by years. They are essential, but they will never replace the actual activity.

So I feel, that marketing comes first because without marketing (and leads coming in), you can't practice and evolve as a leader.

Having a never-ending stream of leads to call is probably the single most important piece to the puzzle when it comes to prospecting because it allows you to adopt an abundance mentality - which I've come to accept as the one trait that has allowed me to achieve the success that I've had.

An abundance mentality shapes all aspects of a persons life, but let's break it down into specific examples...

Having an abundance of leads (which comes from learning how to market), dissipates your fear of loss mentality which is the source of insecurity, anxiety, worry, and frustration - all of which kill self-confidence which is required to sponsor new reps consistently.

Wow... That was a mouthful, so please read that again real quick.

"Fear of loss" is your demon.  

You get what you focus on in life, and the fear of losing (whether it's a sale, prospect, lead, money, respect, or an opportunity), creates emotions that are counter productive to success like the ones I just mentioned... Fear, anxiety, stress, worry, and frustration.

You can "kill" the fear of loss demons in your life by adopting and "abundance mentality."

An abundance mentality simply means that you understand and accept that everything you could ever want in life is present and can be found in infinite abundance - therefore, you never need to fear losing anything.

Let me explain...

When you have an abundance mentality...

You don't care whether or not a specific prospect joins your business or not because you understand that prospects are not limited, but are actually infinite in number.

This mentality allows you to remove any kind of emotional attachment you might have tied to the outcome of that prospect, which eliminates the doubt, worry, fear, or anxiety that would have been generated.

Ridding yourself of this emotional attachment to a given outcome allows you to literally, "have fun", be happy, excited, and confident when you talk to your prospects which starts to flip the psychological triggers that generate attraction.

Before you know it, you're having FUN, and sponsoring people at will, literally forgetting about the other prospects who didn't fall into your reality of abundance within hours.

When you have an abundance mentality...

There's no such thing as fighting over scraps with the competition. Instead, ways to cooperate and both prosper come to mind as the natural solution, instead of trying to fight over, what in the past, would have been considered scarce.

The internet marketing world has been the shining star when it comes to adopting this mentality.

Instead of bashing each other, pointing fingers, calling names, and playing the "mine-is-better-than-yours-game", the world's best internet marketers have made it a practice to promote each other through joint-ventures and affiliate promotions which bring increased abundance to all parties.

But like I said, adopting this abundance mentality is much easier (especially in network marketing), when you have an endless stream of new leads coming into your pipeline on a daily basis.

When you have that, you free yourself to screw it up. You don't care about losing that lead because you know you'll have 10 more tomorrow.

When you have that kind of environment to learn in, you acquire that abundance mentality that allows you to learn quickly and change as a person. (The self-development side).

So in my mind, you want to study marketing and self-development at the same time, but marketing takes precedence.