The challenge of this article, at least for me, is writing it and avoiding the obvious cliches and tropes.

Oh well, if I don't like it I guess I can change it!

It is commonly thought that most people resist change or anything that disrupts our comfort or picture of how things should be.

Is this true? Perhaps, but if it is, the opposite is as well. We are THROWN to change when our reality doesn't match what we are committed to. Change is with us whether we like it or not. If you live, you change; physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

If my late mentor, Mike Smith, were asked about change, I'm guessing he would say:

"It is not people, events, circumstances, or changes that truly affect us, it is our relationship to them."

And how right he'd be. Our inability to change certain things: mortality, time, and gravity, for example, are sometimes the unreasonable source of human breakdowns... UNTIL we realize all the things that we DO have the ability to shift or impact; Our physical well-being, our mindset, our relationship to a higher power, and especially, our contribution to others.

Many years ago, I discovered an amazing possibility for owning my own business; without the assumed criteria of special knowledge, education or degrees, and an exorbitant amount of capital.

It was called "Multi-level marketing."

It makes me feel old to say that at that time, what is now a $200 Billion dollar a year profession was barely two and a half decades old. There was no Herbalife or NuSkin. Amway, barely 20 years old, was predicting one billion in annual sales in the "near" future. Mary Kay Ash was the queen of cosmetics. Avon was "calling!"

Opportunity meetings were spectacles held in hotel rooms.

Frontloading was commonplace.

I had personally never experienced anything like it. It was exciting, fun, lucrative...and quite frankly, a little weird.

If I was to learn how to do it well, I needed to change. I needed to change the way I thought about business; both how it could be done and a new possibility for what success looks like. I needed to learn the tips and techniques of the trade.

Over the next decade, I watched a business model evolve and change. As soon as I thought I knew what I was doing, something would occur that made me think, I didn't. I was tortured and ridiculed by friends and family for wasting my time, money, talent, and education on pyramid "pipe dreams."

Then something wonderful changed,  I did...

Instead of sheepishly following the crowd from one network marketing company or training to another, I made a choice to find what was missing in this experience for it to work for me and others.

I started The Success by Design Institute, Inc. My mission? To create a CHANGE in how network marketing could be trained and done successfully. To shift the stigma it had earned in the conventional business world. I have felt directed and guided ever since.

Oh, how I've changed from that naive 27-year-old youth that began this journey in 1980. Many of my mentors and teachers, and even the closest of friends have left the planet.

Paper applications and fax machines have given way to electronic technologies and the internet highway. Meetings are held virtually now, on Zoom. Lead generation is a multi-billion dollar cottage industry.

Bottom line? My biggest "challenge" with change is noticing it and keeping up.

I find little solace in knowing I'm not unique in this regard. Then I remember that it is not the changes that truly challenge us...it is our relationship with them.