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Report #4: Mastering Your Inner Game
| We’re going to talk about the inner game of building your business. I believe that the inner game is simply all-important. “The inner game” is a new term for a classic idea explained many different times, many different ways by virtually every success educator, and even philosophers. In the book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill reveals the secret using the words, “thoughts are things.” Dennis Waitley has worked with U.S. astronauts and Olympic athletes on their inner games. Author Tim Galloway explores the ideas of his books, The Inner Game of Golf, The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Selling. Interestingly, there is a never-ending connection between the inner game in sport and the inner game in business, allowing experts like Waitley, Galloway, ex-quarterback Fran Tarkenton and golfer Arnold Palmer, among others, to step back and forth between expounding on success techniques in the athletic and business worlds. In all cases, these people speak much more about attitudes than aptitudes for a good reason. Surveys, studies and research consistently reaffirm that 85% of your success will depend on attitudinal factors, 15% on aptitude. Yet in your formal education and in most continuing education, the emphasis is on the opposite - 15% on attitude, 85% on aptitude. Certainly technical knowledge and skills are important. In your profession, you must deliver excellence based on your staying up to date in techniques, products, materials and ideas. However, such excellence alone will never build a successful, growing, profitable business. The excellence that will is an excellence created and sustained in your own mind. This is the most difficult, least tangible aspect of building your business that we’ll ever talk about, but it is also probably the most important. Yeah, but what is it? So what is the inner game? The way I see it, the inner game can be broken down into four major components:
Quality in these four areas is a necessary foundation to personal and professional success. Self Esteem Self Esteem is essentially your feelings of worth. How much success do you deserve? How much money should you make? How much is your time worth? Here, briefly, are seven ideas for strengthening self esteem:
Self Image Self image is how you see yourself; it’s who you think you are. Your self image is controlled mostly by self-imposed limits. Very few people ever perform beyond those self-imposed limits. A salesman whose father never earned more than $25,000 a year in his life may well see himself as a $25,000 a year guy. And he will subconsciously screw up the opportunities to earn more that come his way. In the financial area, the controversial Reverend Ike calls this a money rejection syndrome, and I am convinced that such a thing definitely exists. One man I know, who made over $100 million in his business in its first three years from scratch, had gone broke in business several times before. After the three years of remarkable success, he said, “Making $100 million is about the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Believing it could happen to me was the hard part that took 20 years.” Your self-image was created and is sustained through self talk, the use of affirmations - and that is also the method you can use to alter and modify your self image, literally as you wish. I call the process self image goal setting, because most people who set goals set only “to get” and “to have” goals; they fail to set “to be” goals. I encourage you to balance your approach to goal setting by including some self image modification. Self Discipline Self Disciple, the fourth component of the inner game, is quite possibly the most important. Success lecturer Jim Rohn says that most people do not associate lack of discipline with lack of success. Most people think of failure as one earth-shattering event, such as a company going out of business or a home being foreclosed on. This, however, Jim Rohn says, is how failure happens. Failure is rarely the result of some isolated event; rather, it is a consequence of a long list of accumulated little failures which happen as a result of too little discipline. I agree. I find that most people understandably tend to look everywhere but in the mirror for the sources of their failures as well as the victories. I’m here to tell you it’s not the town you’re in, not your location, not the economy, not the weather, not your competitors - it’s your own discipline that makes the difference between excellence or mediocrity, between getting by or getting rich. It’s interesting to observe professionals. I often say to my associates, “Let me watch the professional’s behavior before, during and after the seminar, and I’ll guess his annual income within a few thousand dollars.” It’s actually pretty easy to do. Jim Rohn says that discipline is the bridge between thought and accomplishment. I’d encourage you to take the self-discipline challenge very seriously. Select those areas that you know are your weakest links - timely paperwork, punctuality, daily selfimprovement study, being happy and enthusiastic first thing in the morning, whatever your personal stumbling blocks are - and apply new, tough, demanding disciplines to yourself in those areas. You’ll find that success in these particular areas of your day-to-day life will roll over into greater success in all parts of you life. For example, let’s look at the ultimate game players - professional football players. A pro ball player knows that every single moment of his on-the-job performance is recorded on film, to be replayed and reviewed later in stop-action slow motion, for critique by his superiors and co-workers. If your day was filmed and reviewed, how would you feel during the replay? Of course, the professional football players who have to put up with this sort of thing are highly paid. Yes, the inner game stuff is tough. If being a big success was easy, everybody would be one. You’ve got to decide what you really want to be, do, have, accomplish - and decide whether or not you’re willing to adhere to the disciplines necessary to get it. In order to have the opportunity to accomplish virtually any goals you honestly desire, you must accept the related responsibility for everything you get. The Story of the Pontiac and the Vanilla Ice Cream To illustrate, here’s the text from an actual but entertaining complaint letter received at the Pontiac Division of General Motors: “This is the second time I have written to you, and I don’t blame you for not answering because what I have to say sounds crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert. But the kind of ice cream varies. “So every night after we’ve eaten, the family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have, and I drive down to the store to get it. It’s also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac, and since then my trip to the store have created a problem. “Every time I buy vanilla ice cream, when I start back from the store, my car won’t start. If I buy another kind of ice cream, the car starts fine. I want you to know that I’m serious about this question no matter how silly it sounds. What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream and easy to start when I get any other kind?” The Pontiac people were understandably skeptical about the letter, but they sent an engineer to check it out. The engineer was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well-educated man in a good neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner, so the two hopped in the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night: sure enough, when they came back to the car, it wouldn’t start. The engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, the man got chocolate and the car started. The next night he got strawberry and the car started. The third night, he ordered vanilla and the car wouldn’t start. Now, the engineer was a logical man and he refused to believe that the Pontiac was allergic to vanilla. He arranged to continue his visits for as long as it took to figure out the problem. And he began to take notes. He jotted down all sorts of data - time of day, type of gas used, time to drive back and forth, etc. In a short time he had a clue. The man took more time to buy any flavor other than vanilla. And that was because of the store’s layout. Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pick up. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the store at a different counter, where it took considerably longer to select the flavor, pay and get back to the car. Now the question for the engineer was why the car wouldn’t start when it took less time. Once time became the problem, not vanilla, the engineer came up with the answer quickly: Vapor lock. It was happening every night, but the extra time it took to get the other flavors allowed the engine time to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapor lock to dissipate. Mystery solved. And the moral of the story is.. One of the points of this story is that cause and effect is a universal law that governs everything in our lives. For every effect, there is a cause, and most frequently the cause is you. You can change things. In fact, one excellent exercise is to make a master list of all things in and out of your business that aren’t as you’d like them to be. Small, medium, large, seemingly significant, apparently trivial - put them all on the list. Then comes the hard part: Go back through the list and decide what you can do to cause some positive improvement with regard to each item, including what changes you might make in your inner game that could impact those items. Look at this as a positive experience: You’ll be discovering how much power you’ve really got! Then, number in order of priority the actions you can take to create change. Then get going. a referral-oriented company, you’ll double your business. Source: 15 Secret, Money Making Reports! | |
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