Active AimA Journey and Destination

One of the best parts of being in direct sales is the fact that you can recruit, train and motivate a team that works for you not only building their own little empire, but helping to boost yours as well. It’s the number one reason many direct sellers concentrate so hard at recruiting a team of their own.

Now that you are a leader of a team, you’ll need to build a strong relationship with team members to not only help them stay strong in their business, but to help your business grow stronger as well. A solid relationship will be one that’s mutually helpful and everyone benefits.

How can you make certain your team is feeling included and supported, but still maintain some sense of balance within your own life and business? It can be demanding trying to provide support to everyone (especially if you have a large team). Follow these five ideas for sustaining a supportive and good connection with your team:

1. Don’t wait to get going! New recruits need lots of communication and support. Even if she doesn’t even have her kit yet, be there to answer questions and provide training materials.

Don’t wait to communicate once she gets her kit. Start the training and mentoring the minute she signs up. You can do this easily via email or texting. Don’t make it a monumental task; just be sure to touch base frequently.

2. GIVE 15. Set aside fifteen minutes of each workday for team phone calls. Use those minutes to call one to five members of your group for a quick “just checking in” call. Leave a message if you get voicemail. The idea is to let them know that you’re thinking of them and giving them a chance to hear your voice. This is a great time to ask how they’re doing with their life as well and get beyond your company to show you care about them. They don’t want to get the feeling you only care because you are making money off of them.

3. Even if you have a personal website for your business, make a team website. It is great for communication. You can post new members, meeting dates and updates, etc. Your team can check it at their convenience and it keeps everyone connected.

4. Meetings are essential, but you can set up tele-seminars and host phone call meeting or online meetings. Whatever method you choose, just do it! Your group will falter faster if they don’t feel supported and meetings are the best way to keep them together and involved.

5. Ecards. They are FREE (great!), but also convenient and fun. Use an Internet calendar function to keep track of birthdays. Once a month go through the upcoming month and set up the ecard deliveries for the birthdays, anniversary dates for the next month or more. You can set these up to deliver up to a year in advance! Everyone likes to get an ecard!

Bottom line…communicate, communicate, communicate! Your team needs to know you are there for them and that you care about them. They’ll be more likely to stay in business, work hard and stay motivated if you do these simple things.

Technorati Tags: direct sales, downline, home business, Leadership, mlm, Network Marketing, sales

Building successful teamwork can be a tough challenge but this does not mean it is impossible. No matter what kind of team it is, it is always possible to bring about effective teamwork.

More often than not, successful teamwork necessitates clear and open lines of communication, building one-on-one relationships among individuals that make up the team, accomplishing ordinary things in an exceptional manner, giving close attention to details, and again, constant communication. Summing this all up would bring you to three factors that facilitate successful teamwork: communication, cooperation, and coordination.

Successful teamwork truly necessitates constant and effective communication. Individuals who make up a team that regularly ask each other where they are going and how they can get there tend to be more successful in working together. This also allows them to be constantly reminded of their team goals. A team is able to function well as a unit when its people have a clear understanding of the team objectives and strategies on how to achieve these are clearly communicated among team members.

Coordinated actions and interactions also facilitate successful teamwork. Team members must know the next steps that need to be done once they have accomplished one task. They must also be aware of who they can seek help from when things do not turn out as expected. Coordinating with fellow team members helps one to have a good grasp of the series of events that need to take place, as well as fallback plans. In addition, coordination also improves the communication process among team members.

Most importantly, team members must cooperate so their team can work together effectively. They must work collaboratively in an environment where there is shared assistance and support. Without cooperation, team effort becomes meaningless. Team members must have a good grasp of the value of each of their fellow team members so they can fully cooperate with one another.

Other important elements that contribute to successful teamwork include showing concern for other people’s accomplishment, willingness to help teammates reach their objectives, and listening to what other people think and say, collectively giving commitment to the success of the team, co-existing with teammates with positive relationships, having harmonious, congenial, and understanding relationships with teammates, and constructive coaching.

Having all these elements in one team might prove to be a difficult task, but if a team does not want to fall short of its expectations and results, they must learn to effectively coordinate, cooperate, and communicate with each other.

Technorati Tags: Coaching, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Team Building, teams, teamwork

Language is indeed powerful. In fact, you unknowingly show others how you view the world by the words you use when speaking.

Experts tell us that people not only use language to describe the world they see, but language and the words used actually help to create the world people experience.

How so?

The words you use, encourage the subconscious to interpret reality in a way consistent with those words.

This powerful tool on the tips of our tongues not only affects us, but also affects people listening to us. So you can change the way someone else views the world by consciously choosing certain words to help their subconscious form a world view you desire.

How is this done?

Using language and words the right way, actually allows you to hypnotize someone you speak to. I don’t mean a complete hypnotic induction like you see in the movies, where someone lies on a couch. But rather, you can speak directly to their subconscious mind when you use the right words and tone of voice. This gives you the ability to influence people to view things the way you want them to.

This allows you to change how people behave by subliminally placing hypnotic suggestions during a friendly conversation.

What to say to do this?

Reaching the subconscious mind is not as hard as you may think. One of the best hypnotists ever, Milton Erickson, developed a model for what I will call conversational hypnosis that has three basic steps. This is called the Milton Model. The three stages of the Milton Model are:

Stage 1.

look for word clues in someone language to detect how they view the world. Especially, words revealing their feelings and what they see and hear. Once you spot the pattern you can use the person’s own experiences to draw attention from the world outside, to their own inner world.

One way to do this is to ask questions like What was that like for you? or How do you feel about that?

This is focusing them inward where they will understand how their world view makes them feel.

Stage 2.

The next stage of the Erickson Model is aimed at distracting the person’s conscious mind. Milton Erickson did this by speaking with complex and ambiguous langauge.

He would use words that sounded the same, but had different meanings, like wander/wonder, sale/sail, hear/here, right/write, You get the picture.

He liked using double binds, which only presented the desired options. For example, he might say the following: I can’t tell if you will enter a trance now, or in a few minutes.

This use of language allows the mind no options, except to go into a trance now or in a few minutes. This also uses an embedded command, to fall into a trance now or in a few minutes.

Incorrectly using words, distracts and confuses the conscious brain and causes it to turn inward for help from the subconscious brain.

Well, that’s a couple Milton Model techniques of mind distraction. I really don’t know if you would want to learn a lot more about the Milton Model of conversational hypnosis now or later
STAGE 3.

Once the mind has been distracted, the final step in the Milton Model is to access the subconscious minds resources.

You can do this in a couple of ways. The most basic is by embedding commands in questions or sentences, so that they are not too obvious to the conscious mind, but are very obvious to the subconscious mind.

Here are some examples:

–Who knows if you will certainly wash to dishes right away –You should do it, shouldn’t you? –You are going to do this, didn’t you? (this sounds like it doesn’t make any sense, but your subconscious mind will hear the command)

So, it sounds like all you need to do is say some confusing things to someone, with embedded commands and you can get her to do whatever you want.

Well, my answer to that is maybe.

The important point of conversational hypnosis is that you can only make someone do something that does not violate their beliefs and values.

You can definitely speak to someones subconscious mind using the Milton Model techniques, but it takes a lot more than a quick conversation to change someones values.

But, as you practice the Milton Model you will find that you will get better at influencing the people around you as long as you aren’t trying to manipulate them.

Technorati Tags: conversational hypnosis, covert hypnosis, hypnosis, influence, Leadership, persuasion, power of conversational hypnosis, subliminal influence, subliminal persuasion

Many inexperienced leaders fail to sufficiently convey a vision to the subordinates they lead. If you are not skilled in telling everyone which direction to head you’ll have confusion. Worse yet, you’ll have a situation where people start creating their own direction. For some leaders their deficiency comes not from a lack of communication but from not having a vision themselves.

Vision is what determines what an organization is going to try to accomplish. Without a clear vision the organization will be pulled in many different directions. Some of these directions will cancel each other out, so even though much work will be done, very little is actually accomplished.

It is much easier to lead if you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and your ideas are good. Even if you don’t have a tremendous amount of skill as a leader, having a clear vision can help you through your shortcomings. People want to follow someone with a plan. By having a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, you will attract followers and people who want to align themselves with your vision. Individuals realize that on of the cornerstones of success is a clear vision. For this reason they want to align themselves with someone who articulates a vision—they want to join in the success.

In fact a poor leader with a great vision, will achieve more than a great leader with an ill-conceived plan. Success covers a huge number of failures. If you are successful, people will tend to forget many mistakes you make as a leader. If you are ineffective people are less likely to overlook your deficiencies in vision. People want to follow someone who will lead them to success. If you appear to be able to do this, people will want to follow you. If you have a track record of success, people will want to follow you. If you have a track record of failure, people will want to distance themselves from you in order to avoid your failures in the future.

If you are pushing people toward shared success, they will tend to stick with you because they are succeeding. In some cases they may even start mimicking some of your poor leadership habits thinking they are part of the reason for your success. Many people mistake success for good leadership skills. That is because people want to follow people with whom they can be successful.

Obviously good leadership skills are very important. It is much better to lead with a solid vision and skillful leadership expertise. Just make sure that as you develop your leadership skills, you don’t overlook the skills that will let you develop a vision that makes it worth it for followers to follow you.

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