Catching Slumps Before They Happen Part 2 How To Avoid

Good morning. We're going to talk about you this morning and we're going to talk about staying on track. If you are not mentally organized about how to stay on track this year, it doesn't matter the game plan you started with, you just. It ain't going to happen. So we're going to be talking about organizing yourself for success outlook. And I've been thinking about that a lot because of the ABI principle. There's two pictures right here. Let's talk about the picture and the point I cover. I've got a thing about the intro. The intro is how do you get from where you are to where you want to be? Why is it that some people can do it, some people can't. Some people, and you can't pick them out of the crowd. How do you go from confusion to clarity about getting the job done? And here is the key comes into it's not what happens to you, it's how you respond to what happens to you. Because we all are going to have things that we have to deal with, unfortunately. Well, fortunately, because it keeps you on your toes. And that's actually what living is. Because we haven't died and gone to heaven yet. So sometimes we expect that to be the way it is supposed to be down here. But the idea is this year, this year, let me get myself tougher, mentally organized and definite about how I am going to respond. Because if you don't, you are going to find yourself just knocked off track. And you don't just always quit, but you get delayed, you get stalled, you wind up getting beat because you lose focus. As a result, you lose time, you miss your opportunity. So the picture is this basically a teeter totter, a slide and a ladder. And here's what I'm going to show you as we go forward. We're going to go start the year off and we have certain things we want to have happen. The thing is, you may not be perfectly organized on this, you can move these around. But if we were to go down the list right now, put everybody on the spot and say, what is the number one thing you want to have happen in your life, your business life? Let's say this year it's going to have something to do with growing. And so we talked about that. So what's going to keep you on track? We would love to just be able to go straight to it. Actually, what we would love is in the month of January to get on an elevator escalator and go bam. And take the rest of the year off. But that ain't going to happen. So we can forget about that. This isn't going to happen. You never have a straight line of success. Reality will be, maybe you get off to a slow start. Maybe you get things going for a while, then maybe you flatline for a while, then maybe you go down here, then you got to make a heroic effort. Hey, it's going to be easy. You have at this point. This has been like two or three years ago where you had this incredible burst. And in your mind it's like, hey, wow. And so you visualize. As soon as you get this in your mind, you visualize, bam. We really are that good. It did work. But then what happens is the next month is reality gets in and you're back down here again. And so you start, you know, you go with yourself and you say, what's up here? What's happening? Sometimes it's you. It's always a combination of things. But what can you do to keep yourself from. As you go through these roller coaster things? If you did this once, that kind of trajectory going up and you're down here, you got to say, I can get going like that again. I'm going to try and get going on that. And then maybe if it's not even perfect, I get going for a while, I can kind of screw around and still, I can still win the game. You see it on the NFL, see it on these football games, and that's the easiest thing. You see it in college, the quarterback's throwing three or four interceptions, they're fumbling the ball. But the deal is you got 60 minutes, you know, in a football game, you got the whole 60 minutes. And you see people, we've already did it. You know, we already won. Then the other team comes back and knocks them out in the last. See, when you win, it wipes out all of these things here. It wipes out all of this. All people know is, and all you'll remember is that you did it. Now, they won't. When they come and they ask you to speak or they want to go call you up on the phone and ask your advice and everything, they're not going to be asking you about, how did you blow this? How did you fumble the ball here? How did you take all this momentum you had earlier in the year and stumble and fumble your way through? They're not going to say that. They're just going to say, how did you win anyway? Now they'll be asking you about your system and everything, but what caused you to win the Main reason is because you were mentally tough, you kept your focus. See, there may be people, and there probably are people who know how to run this play, this game plan that you use when you get there, how you get people in, you recruit them, you train them, you move them up, or you start on a prospecting blitz and you follow through. And how you deal with the clients when you get in front of them and all of those kind of things, they may be better at all of those things than you. But if you're better at staying on track, using the time, turning slumps around, recognizing slops than they are, you keep your focus better than them. You're able to recognize. See, one thing that can turn you into a huge winner and you don't have to learn one more thing, is that you start to recognize slumps before they take off. And so the illustration there that I want to show you, the picture has to do with this Nick Saban, the Alabama football coach, how he bungled away the year he had won two championships, back to back, two national championships, unheard of. He was going for the third. He should have won it. But they got knocked out. They had two losses, but it started. The signs of disaster showed up earlier. And here's where it came in. There's two things. If you're going to win and you're going to go to the top. And in the over here, I've got the kind of outlines you're going to have to stop quitting and keep improving. The way you go to the top is you stop quitting. You got to understand quitting, quitting is not necessary. And keep improving, relentless improvement. You get down and you go into a slump. It's not fun when you get up here, you go into a swap. But here's the moment, if you can recognize this right here, these critical moments where you have your upward momentum and before it goes flatline, it starts to slack off, see if you can learn to recognize the thing they have with recruits and with clients and everything. You control the point of contact. If you guys can get better at controlling the point of contact, control point of contact, of quitting. Basically, when slumps begin, if you can get where you can control that and turn it around, and instead of quitting, you keep on improving. The reason you keep going up, the reason these things happen, is you outgrow what you know how to do, you've had more success than ever before, and you get off track, you get overwhelmed, or you get over my success or my problem, and you get sidetracked. You're not doing the same things that caused you to have this. In the 24 hours of the day, you're not doing more and more of this kind of stuff. You're doing less of this and more and more of dealing with problems and making excuses. Your eye is off the ball either because you got too much good or too many obstacles. It could come from either good or bad things causing you. But the result is you get your eye off the ball. If you can control that and get back on track. And you do that by continuing to improve. So you have a choice at this point. These things right here could be the turning point to greatness. You know what this is? This is like if you're racing cars. This is the curve. This is the curve. Everyone does great in the straightaway. When everything's going great, everything's going perfect. You just stay on track. You're slapping each other in the back, you're laughing, you're happy. Everything you got your momentum. But when it starts to turn, it always happens in football games, basketball games. It'll happen three, four, five times a game where one team will get up on a run, they call it a run, and every time they go down the court, they just can't do anything wrong. Guy comes in off the bench, he hasn't played all year, he throws up a 30 foot shot, it goes in, they're on a run, he comes down, he throws up another one, he goes in. But when they start to lose their momentum, the star player even kicks the ball away. Things like they go through stretches where nobody can do anything right. Well, if you can control, settle down in those transitions and keep improving, you can keep it going, keep your growth going. Ones who do that, what I wanted to do is to put a picture in here and show you, here's quitting. They don't go the same. Quitting means you get on, you can't quit. Let's just say you start the year again. Nobody quits when they're down here. There is no quitting, no quitting. When you're on the bottom, you don't see the homeless guys say, okay, I quit. Pressure is too much, I quit. You say, when are you going to quit? You've already quit. Oh, sorry. The people who quit are people who've gotten out, they've made an effort. Just say in a personal life, they've lost some weight, they've gone to the gym for two or three, four weeks. They've been eating clean, they're getting results, they're all happy. But then a Little stress at work, couldn't get to the. Get a cold, get some comfort food, miss a few workouts, have a slump, and they said too much. I just can't keep this up. Quit the quitting time. I lost my trainer, it's too crowded at the gym, yada, yada, yada, I'm sore. But here's what happens when you quit. It starts slow. Analyze. Think about this. It starts slow because what happens, you got growth, you got momentum, so your momentum slows down. You got to slow down in your momentum. And then so you. What happens is you slow down, have focus shifts, and then you give up. And here's what happens. You slide, accelerating to the bottom. Once you get on this thing and once you let it take off, it is yahoo. As soon as you jump on the slide, it's going to take you all the way to the bottom and you're going to be back where you started again. Now you're in worse shape, right to the bottom. The result, back where you started, in worse shape than when you started. And you don't have to quit. The thing you need to know is quitting is a totally different phenomenon because when you quit, once it starts, it starts to pick up momentum. You get a slowdown in your up momentum and you start to pick up. You begin to pick up the quitting momentum. We need to regroup. You know, you have ways to say, we need to regroup here. I need to rethink. We need to go back. We need to, you know, all the reasons we started too early. We, you know, we didn't think this through. You know, so, okay, you make it all right for yourself. And then once it starts to take off, the problem is you can't stop it because you're out of control. You've given it. Now gravity is going to take over until you get to the bottom. See, it's going to drag you, send you like a roller coaster right down to the bottom. That's why you've got to watch your momentum as you go through the year. The other thing is climbing, growing, improving. Winning is step by step. One, focus, step. It's like you're on a ladder and you're climbing that ladder, and you've got to go every rung. Like we said, it's not a straight ladder. Things cause it to have bends in it, but you've got to make. If you're here and you're climbing and you're walking up this thing, you've got to make the conscious decision to move up. You can't there is no elevator or slide. If you want to quit, gravity will take over and shoot you to the top. If you want to go to the top, that's why everybody's on the bottom. If you draw a pyramid of people, if you draw a picture of income, standard of living, quality of life, any way you do it, it's always a pyramid. There's always few at the top and most at the bottom. Why is that? Because it takes effort to go up. What did the Occupy Wall street people do? They went and laid on the sidewalk in New York and in cities all over the country saying, this isn't right. All those people have all the money. Well, sure, it's not right, not perfect. It's an imperfect world. But the people in the big tall building, the people who had the money, were people who at least worked to climb up there. There is no system we can get to where we can take the few people, take what they've got, and make all of you all have a fantastic quality of life. You wouldn't enjoy it anyway. And so people who give, it's much easier to give up. See, this is easier, this is harder, simply because you have to make the effort. But that's why there's so much room at the top. That's why it's available to you. And all you got to do is stop this quitting. Be smarter than getting on this quitting slide. It's almost like at every step along the way, you get the chance. You get the chance to climb one more positive rung up the ladder. Focus your energy, stay on track, deal with your issues that come up, Keep putting time, energy and effort to keep yourself on track. And at every step, you've got the thing where, well, you could get overwhelmed. Things are going to happen at every point to get you a thing to either start flatlining, there's an exit ramp at every step. That's what I want to tell you. Nick Saban, the Alabama coach, See, and they play, they get about 12 games a year. I don't know with their bowls and this, that and the other, but they usually play about 12 games. 12, 14, with whatever. Every game after you win, you got a chance to start blaming other people, criticizing, making excuses, fighting things wrong to where you get off track. And that's where you begin your slide. And if you don't. But the point is this. You can catch yourself, but you got to realize there's a trap door in every step. And you can get all the way to the point of ringing the bell. You get It. But there's a trap door. You got to avoid it. You got to be mentally tough. Avoid the tendency. The trap door down and it sneaks up on you. You can be so happy about some of the stuff. You just. This is where the arrogance. We all get arrogant when we're successful. Oh, yes. Nothing can stop us now. We're beyond that. And then a couple of things go wrong and I wish they hadn't done that. Why did they do that? That's a shame. You start looking at that stuff and you stop focusing on moving up. You have to make a conscious decision to stay on track, is what I'm telling you, because you have to lift yourself up. That's why people. You lift. Now if you lie, cheat and steal and lift yourself up, of course that's wrong. But by and large, the world is a great equalizer. And even the great, I mean, the Bernie Madoffs, you know, they got a movie now, the Wolf of Wall street, you know, you cheat your way there, it's not going to last. And you're going to have, you know, you might have some temporary, but you're going to finish out your life as a humiliating disaster. And no smart person wants to do that. So I don't talk about that a lot. You lift yourself up either by, you know, through faith in your God and trusting in. In him. This doesn't rule out God, but you do. Through your faith, through your efforts, through your work, through your focus and how you do it. Improve. You keep improving because the higher you go, the more things change, the more complicated it is. The more people are involved, the more success. And it'll be more than you've ever done in your life. If you're growing. And so you, you have to get better and so you have to drive yourself. I do it all day long because the choice, you know, this is simple choice. And see, here's the thing. The teeter totter. What's the teeter totter? The teeter totter is right here. At every step, you've got to avoid. You got to realize you're on a teeter totter and make sure you stay on the winning side by continuing to improve rather than move into the disintegrating side and slide to the bottom. So your choice is you can improve or you'll disintegrate. That's the whole thing of grow or die. And see, this is where the teeter totter is right there. And in everything in life, we either headed down or we're going up. You're going to work anyway. The thing is, it's not like losing doesn't require. There's not work and annoyance and this, that and the other. Losing is no fun. Quitting is no fun. It really doesn't make all your problems go away. Jumping off your diet does not make all your problems go away. Eating the comfort food, skipping workouts, things like that, whining and complaining, it really doesn't make anything any better. But it feels good. So if you're going to do it, do as little as possible and get your butt back on the winning side and start improving again. Because you let it go too long, you're going to start to slide and go all the way to the bottom. That's what I wanted to say put today. And that's one of the big things, big points I want to make in the book about the Abi Principle is the alternative to if you're not in the Abi mode, you're going to be in the Abi abd. You're going to always be disintegrating and falling apart. You live your life constantly with a choice of giving up, quitting or keeping the fight going to improve your life and to chase your dreams one step at a time.