The One Ability That Will Make You Unstoppable

Pop quiz, hotshot: What’s the most important skill you must have in order to be successful as a Nu Skin distributor?

Is it salesmanship? Is it social media savvy, or product knowledge?

Or is it tech stuff, like the ability to set up and manage Nu Skin’s new online prospecting website, capture leads, manage an email list, and so on?

If you answered any of these, important as they might be, sorry, you’re wrong.

You don’t need to possess any of those skills, because you can outsource them, or you can go out and learn them anytime you want.

You can learn anything nowadays, usually for free. Want to learn how to field-strip an obscure Russian firearm that hasn’t been manufactured since 1927? I’ll bet someone has made a YouTube video showing you how.

All the knowledge in the world is literally at our fingertips. Yet only a handful of people break through from wanna-be-successes to true successes. So what’s missing?

What distributors need most isn’t knowledge. What they need is the ability to evolve.

You must analyze and adapt.

There’s a lot of talk in Nu Skin circles about how if you don’t keep doing what your upline has come to expect from you, you’re just confusing your downline.  If you do something odd and out of character, or not within the current  ”duplication model”, your business won’t grow….blah, blah, blah.

What terrible advice.

Even big companies that become dogmatic get slaughtered nowadays. Look at the music and film industries, and the crap they tried to hand us to protect themselves while their inflexible models drowned.

Now, look at the success stories.

While Borders bookstores were dying, Amazon led the e-book revolution with Kindle. They also went from selling books to selling everything under the sun, and started providing tech services like Amazon S3 media hosting.Google entered a market that already had dominant search engines, like Yahoo and Lycos, but then branched from search into apps, smartphone operating systems, voice communications, mapping and navigation, co mmerce services, and just about everything else. And now who’s the household name?

Teamelites.com started as a blog about network marketing. Then it became more about social media, online communities. Then we began innovating with training, now we are developing new concepts and systems that leverage the latest technology for Nu Skin distributors.

At no point did Traci and I think, “Woah, wait a minute… a website that promotes new ideas and business models? That’ll confuse everyone” and ditch the whole thing to go back to only writing blog posts.

Mindlessly sticking to what used to work is overrated especially in network marketing. In North America some of our leaders have both feet in the past trying to recapture long lost glory. You know the definition of insanity right?

Nobody knows how to describe us. This includes myself. People ask us what we do, and I never know what exactly what to tell them and I love that. It is always progressing and changing. And that freaks out some in Nu Skin as well.

In the next few months, we are going to focus exclusively on weight management, get deep into mobile computing, work on a new book, write more of those epic blog posts, expand into digital publishing, and host more unique and amazing Nu Skin and R90 Challenge events.

That’s a lot of change coming for us, but I can tell you one thing for certain: if at any point I’d stuck to my guns and said, “I’m a network marketer,” or “I’m a tech guy” or “I’m a blogger” and refused to evolve, I’d be out of business today.

And I see numerous Nu Skin distributors on their way out the door because they think their business should not evolve.

Change your mind. Right now.

Sometimes people ask me why I talk so much about stuff that’s intangible, stuff that you might describe as “upping your mental game.” The reason is because it’s the only thing that will make a difference Nu Skin business.

Meaning: You don’t need more knowledge, because you have access to more knowledge than you can handle.

What you need is the mindset to actually go out and use what you know.

You don’t need skills. You need meta-skills.

You’ve got to learn to be uncertain and take risks. If you stay within what’s known and safe, you will never be truly successful in Nu Skin. Doing what’s uncertain and risky isn’t easy, and that’s why the people who dare to do it are rewarded.

I of course have all the admiration in the world for leaders in North America that have had big successes in the past but what they did should not necessarily be what you should be doing. This includes myself.

You’ve got to learn to lead, which simply means going out and doing things. If you do things instead of always thinking and talking about doing things, then congratulations, you’re a leader. Others will follow.

You’ve got to learn to solve problems. I unschool my kids because I believe that children don’t need to memorize facts — especially in a world that changes this rapidly. They need to learn how to look at a situation, determine which resources they need, and then go find those resources in order to solve the problem. We must all learn to fish instead of relying on others giving us fish.

You’ve got to start believing you can do it. That sounds rah-rah, but it’s very important. We train ourselves into believing that we can do some things and can’t do others. Think you can’t do calculus? Wrong. You can’t levitate on Earth without assistance or superpowers. There’s a huge difference between those “can’ts.” (Other manifestations of this: “I’m not that kind of person,” “I wasn’t raised that way,” and “What will my parents/friends/neighbors/Twilight fan club think?”)

You’ve been a little bit brainwashed by the circumstances you’ve lived through. It’s okay, because we all have. But what you need to understand is that that cultural brainwashing puts you at a disadvantage as an entrepreneur and Nu Skin distributor.

It may sound trite to talk about upping your mental game … but if you don’t do exactly that, you’ll be stuck forever.

Can’t make yourself do what needs to be done in your Nu Skin business? Are you afraid? Are you uncertain? Do you get stuck? Do you know everything you need to know — and know exactly what you need to do — but just … can’t … seem to … do it?

That happens because you’re believing lies that you’ve been told or have learned, and have internalized those lies as rules and limitations. But they’re not true.

They are not true.

How are you struggling in your mental game? Let me know in the comments …