“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” -- Earl Nightingale

Give people the chance.

I traveled to Canada’s Bay of Fundy to see the world’s largest tides. After viewing the display, I stayed in Moncton and did a training for the local networkers. One enthusiastic networker sat in the front row and told me his story. He was in his mid-20s.

"I worked as the order taker at a Tim Horton’s restaurant. Every Thursday night a group of businessmen would come in around 10:30 PM. They wore suits and ties. They would chat enthusiastically into the late hours of the evening while drinking coffee and eating donuts.

"I wanted to be like them. A businessman with a future, instead of a minimum-wage employee taking food and coffee orders. I tried to listen in on their conversations to find out what they did, but I had to stay at my station.

"Finally, one evening one of the ‘suit people’ invited me to have a conversation about improving my life. I got introduced to network marketing. This was the happiest day of my life. Now I have a future instead of a minimum-wage job."

Think of all the networkers that prejudged this young man. They withheld a better future from him and his family. While he didn’t have a full-time income when he talked to me, he had built a great part-time income in the last two years. His family and children not only appreciated the money, but they had bright futures ahead.

We don’t know the situations of other people. We only see the top 10% of people’s lives on social media. Who knows what kind of problems or challenges they face? Shouldn’t we at least give them the option of looking at our business?

Use these opening sentence ideas to prompt conversations.

"Is now a good time to fix the problem? Or do we want the problem to stay?"

"Everyone knows inflation isn’t going away."

"Get paid for chatting over coffee."

"Have you ever had this problem?"

"99% of our friends are wrong."

Need more "starter words" to attract prospects? Our opening words should get prospects to think.

"Are coffee breaks the only free time in your life?"

"What your boss doesn't want you to know about raises."

"Free sample from the ‘Fountain of Youth.’"

"Want to try a new diet?"

"How to make every day a Saturday."

"How to avoid alarm clock stress and other work-related diseases."

"Five-day weekends are better than two."

"Make your telephone bill disappear - forever!"

"Does your spouse wonder why your paycheck is so small?"

This was unbelievable to me 50 years ago.

If someone had shared these absurd brain rules with me 50 years ago, I would have told them, “You are crazy!“

But brain science can turn ordinary, ineffective network marketers like me, into productive sponsors and team-builders. All we have to do is learn from these smart brain researchers, and getting “yes” decisions becomes easy.

It is what we don’t know that holds us back.

Ready for a few brain rules?

The list can go on and on. It takes time to learn what we don’t know, but the good news is that we can learn.

If you are a professional network marketer, or if you want to pretend to be one ...

... Then you will want to use the six levels of communication. An example?

It's Christmas Day. We go online and have a Zoom conversation with our granddaughter. We make her laugh. She tells us about her day.

Now, compare that to sending our granddaughter a text message for Christmas.

And that is why we should talk to prospects.

Let’s be pros and not amateurs.

The Jerk...

My successful upline: “Stop giving prospects all the information.”

Me (the jerk): “I would never join unless I had all the information.” Yes, I was 100% correct. I would never join unless I had all the information.

My successful upline was wrong. I was living proof. And I didn’t mind telling them how wrong they were.

Uh ... but I missed one important fact. I wasn’t giving presentations to myself. I was giving presentations to prospects who did not think like me! That is when I learned the lesson, “Don’t judge skills or lessons based upon what I think. My prospects will think differently because they are not me.” So while I loved the information and needed it for my decision, this was a terrible way to present it to others. Then when I learned that decisions were made immediately in the subconscious mind, my humiliation grew. I didn’t even understand how my mind made decisions.

I changed. Now when I hear something I disagree with, I don’t immediately discount it. I try to have a more open mind. I should not judge the skills of how to talk to others based upon my personal preferences.

Take a look at a few brain rules for our profession. See if you have the same resistance I did when I first saw them: ·

All decisions are made in the subconscious mind.
Well ... we get the idea here. I could make a longer list of initial brain rules, but for most people, here is what happens.

They experience the same knee-jerk reaction I had when I first saw these. Our immediate response is to resist. For me, I wanted to keep those manipulative 1960s sales techniques I had learned. They were not working for me, so why did I believe they were true? No idea. Maybe I was a jerk.

One brain rule is that humans hate changing their minds. I didn’t like hearing that rule either. :) But once I learned about cognitive biases, I changed.
If there is one thing we should take away from my sad story, it is this: “Don’t pass judgment on what works or doesn’t work based upon us. We are not our prospects. We think differently.”