You read that right. You are letting people push you around and you don’t even know or think about it. I do too!

I know this sounds crazy, but it is true. You are not doing it on purpose.

Now, having said all that, you are not physically getting pushed around. You are letting others control your mind, control your thinking, and thus controlling you. By following others on social media, by comparing yourself to others, by listening or reading something and letting it affect your attitude. You are allowing external forces to push you around.

It is easy to notice these external forces controlling you? Heck NO! If it were, then the social media companies would be out of business. You do have to be very careful though. Be careful to not allow others to influence your thinking and decision making. Be careful to not allow what others have or do affect how you feel about yourself. I really think this is an epidemic problem in our society and it is getting worse as we rely more on technology for our entertainment.

You do you hang around with? Jim Rohn says you are the average of the 5 people you hang around the most. I’d say that is pretty accurate. What do they have you watching? What do they have you thinking? What do they have you doing? What do they have you saying? What do they have you reading? Where do they have you going? Is all that ok?

Start to notice when you are in envy. Start to notice when you are jealous. Start to notice when you are comparing. Start to notice when you are letting someone or something negatively affect your attitude.

If you are really struggling to get this stuff, then hire a coach. It is by far the fastest and best way to identify where you are struggling. We all have blind spots. As business owners, leaders, & family members, it is our job to get better and not get stuck in a rut that is taking us in the wrong direction long term.

#Journal about what you are thinking and how you are reacting. Write down the current thinking and actions and the feelings around those, then write down how you’d prefer to think, act and feel. Then get to work at it. You have to do something, you just can’t think about it and do nothing.

Don’t let others push you around!

Steve Aune

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#journaling today
We know that your mind will only allow you to see, hear, & understand that which it wants you to.
Think about that. Even if something is presented to you, explained to you, demonstrated for you, if your mind is not ready, you will not take it in. And we wonder why we only retain 10% of what we are taught.

This is why it is so important to have someone in your life that will say what needs to be said, they will call you out when you are being unreasonable. They will help you understand that it is your subconscious programming that is holding you back.

I consider myself pretty acutely aware of what I am thinking and feeling, and yet I struggle with this perception that I can control my senses.

I cannot do this by myself to the level that is necessary. You cannot by your self either.

• 

How often do I over react? A lot

How often do I fail to see all sides before coming up with my own opinion? Most of the time.
How can I train myself to be more aware of everything that is possible before reacting?

Meditation is a good place to start.

Journaling is the key to succeeding!

Hiring a coach is the very best way to make an difference fast and create lasting change.

Steve Aune

http://www.abundanceattitude.com

If you are like a lot of people I talk to, you have an interest in starting to journal and you don’t know where to start.

Is that you?

Journaling can take on many different methods, strategies, and tactics. The most effective ones are starting and doing it. Not what most people want to hear though. When I teach people how to journal effectively, I tell them to think BIG and act SMALL.

You’ve probably heard that before, a lot of folks have talked about it or written about it.

When I say think BIG and act SMALL, that is the big goal is to journal. The act SMALL is to start by just journaling for a couple minutes a day. Start with gratitude. Start with writing your goals and one thing you can do that day to move towards them. Don’t over think it, just do it. Eventually you will build the habit muscle to do it daily and then you can start to expand on the volume of what you journal about.

Some of the biggest things you can get from journaling:

1. Mental Clarity –
2. Reduced Stress & anxiety
3. Less Chaos
4. No More – I am just so busy.
5. You can heal your mind and body.
6. You get clarity around what is true for you that is not true for everyone else.
7. You understand why you are the way you are and can see that more frequently.
8. You can appreciate other peoples perspectives better.
9. You become a better listener.
10. You are much happier and live with joy and grace.

Who wouldn’t want all that?

I have personally benefited from journaling, physically in healing my body. Mentally in living a healthier lifestyle and having better relationships. Spiritually in living in peace and joy, enjoying slowing my mind down to focus on what is important.

You can too!

To yours in abundance,

Steve Aune

This is from a book I started in 2008.

Abundance Attitude
By Steven M. Aune

By having an Abundance Attitude, you free yourself from scarcity. What does that mean? Once you have faith and believe that abundance is available to you, then you will note live day to day worrying about not having enough. If you are a business owner, you realize that abundance is all around you and that competition is healthy for your business and it could actually help your business if you have the right attitude in abundance. If you find yourself measuring up to others, or some benchmark, and all you do is hit the minimums, then have a scarcity mentality, just enough to get by.

I was at a speed networking function and while there I met some amazing people. I was eventually paired up with one of my main competitors in my industry. It seemed kind of weird to be sitting across from a competitor, even though I always wanted to meet him. You might be asking, why would you want to meet this person? Turns out that we had a lot in common, a lot of people we know in common, etc. While visiting with him, I asked questions and just listened to him telling me stories about his life and the people in it. It was really interesting. I respect the other people in my industry and never talk bad about them, because I have an attitude that there is an abundant amount of business to go around, and I am confident in my ability to attract that business to me. By getting to know my competition I may be able to help them by referring people to them that do not fit my clientele base. They just might return the favor too!! Hard to believe, however it does happen with the right attitude.

On a recent hunting trip, I was telling my friend about this book I started writing. He was asking questions and I explained my philosophy. We then talked about someone he works with who will do everything in his power to make others look bad or make it look like they messed up when in reality it was him that looked bad. He has a lot of scarcity and lack of personal accountability. If you don’t accept responsibility for your own actions or your own results, do yourself a favor, don’t blame others, and accept responsibility for your own actions. People who really are in abundance, accept responsibility.

My wife has done a great job of making new friends over the years. She has found some great people to connect with. As with any relationship or friendship, we always try to involve the other persons significant other and do a couples event. It is always a good time, I really enjoy meeting new people as well. It seems that most of the time one of us hits it off, however the other one does not. That does not mean that we abandon the relationship. I believe that I can still offer the friendship some value and make a difference in the lives of others. We may not do many couples events like we would if we all “hit it off” so to speak. What I like about meeting others is that you should not go into the relationship with a negative or I am too good attitude, because you never know what type of value this person may bring to you, and better yet, you may be able to really make a difference in their life, which ultimately displays abundance and you will reap the benefits long term.
We recently tried to set up a dinner with one of Jenny’s new acquaintances and her husband. Jenny and this other Mom have some common interests, like running, and being a mother of a preschooler. They thought it would be a good idea to get together. I am always willing to meet others, yet the other husband did not want to put for the effort to meet us, he does not need to meet more people. He has enough friends and does not need to meet more. I found this really fascinating. He is very comfortable with who he is and who he surrounds himself with, what a great asset to have. Then I start wondering is it because he will not like us? Is it because he and I are in the same field of work? Is it because he just does not want to meet more people?
All of those questions are for me to decide. What kind of an abundance attitude would I need to have to not second guess the situation? What kind of attitude would I have to have to not think about why? I believe that for me to be in abundance I cannot worry about others. I just have to contribute what I can to every relationship I engage in so that I can bring abundance into their lives. I cannot worry about what they do or say, just how I react to it.

Every time you are encountered with a decision to make, take notice if you are in scarcity or abundance with how you are thinking. If you meet another person and you are somewhat offended by what they are dressed like, drive, or live in, then you may be in scarcity on what you have.
If you are trying to figure out how to get more hours in the day, realize that everyone has the same 24hrs per day. We made up the function of time, the universe did not. How do some people get more accomplished each day and some others cannot seem to find enough time to get in all that they desire. Do they really desire to get it all in? How big of a priority is it if you run out of time?
Some people say they don’t have time to exercise. Is it really because they do not have the time, or is it not a high enough priority for them? I believe it is not a priority for them. They really didn’t want to do it anyway. What is happening in their life that is a higher priority than preserving your health? I find it interesting how people view exercise.
Some things that you can do to help you get more out of your day:
1. List out all of the tasks that you have on your mind. This means all of the small projects as well as all of the BIG projects. They could be at home or at work, etc. Some could be installing a new light fixture, dusting, repairing a damaged wall, cleaning off your desk, etc. All of these little energy drains are preventing you from attracting more abundance to you. These seemingly petty tasks suck energy from you continually whether you believe it or not. List out at least 80-100 items.
2. Now start checking them off, get rid of them. Either take some time to do them or hire it out, or just plain get rid of it.
3. Write out what is really important to you. What is your life purpose. Get really clear about this.
4. Push yourself to do more. How will you know if you are maxed out until you really max yourself out? Somebody, somewhere, has it figured out, why not you.
5. Block out your day. Take your day and break it down into chunks of time. Mine starts at 4:30am. From 4:30-6:30am, this is my time. I exercise, read, self study, plan my day, etc. It is the best time for me. I then chunk out my work day, family time, and free time. Always leave room for free time to attract new abundances into your life.

There are a lot of ways to bring more abundance into your life. The first step is in your thinking. Identify where you are not living in abundance and then start to reprogram your thinking and start acting the new way even before you believe it. Because once you do it enough, you will start to believe it.

To your health & abundance,

Steve Aune

You hear it all the time, ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING!  It is all about your ATTITUDE.  It is not what happens to you, it is your ATTITUDE and what you do about it next.

Two of my favorite quotes: 1. “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”.  Wayne Dyer.  2. “Turn your frustrations into fascinations”.  Jim Rohn.

Think about those two quotes.  How you view the world, how you view everything, is not how it really is.  It is how you see it, based on your view, perceptions, opinions, and experience.  How you see it is not the truth, however it may seem like it is true for you.

I experience this stuff all the time.  For years I was, and sometimes I still am, ignorant to what is really going on.  We/I have to constantly ask myself, “is this really true or just true for me?”  “What other possibilities are there?”

I know from experience and witnessing others that how you respond is definitely a factor in your perception of things.  If you respond with abundance, curiosity, and patience, then you will live with less stress, less anxiety, and live a healthier life.

So how do you fix what is currently happening in your head?

I believe that JOURNALING & MEDITATION are the two best ways to relax, calm your mind, and get clarity around the type of person you want to become.   Napoleon Hill talks about this in great detail in his book “Think & Grow Rich”.  Spend 30min a day thinking about the person you intend to become.  10min a day gaining self confidence around that.  Powerful stuff.  How many of us actually do that?

JOURNALING & MEDITATION will get you there.

I teach people how to journal on a daily basis.  I can help you too.

Remember, “what is easy to do, is also easy not to do.” Jim Rohn.

Someday something will happen that will force you to look at things differently and it may be too late to fix it.  Time exposes everything.  You can choose to be proactive now and start to work on yourself, or you can choose to wait because you don’t have time or you don’t believe it will work, and take the consequences for having done nothing later.  Time exposes everything!

While it is not entirely about attitude, your attitude definitely plays a major role!

To your health & abundance,

Steve Aune

Steve.aune@sandler.com

 

It has been 14 months since I herniated a disc in my neck and caused severe pain, numbness, and overall discomfort in my neck and left arm.  If you’ve read the blog, you know the history of what I went through, so I won’t belabor that history and instead I am focusing on the now and the future.

In an effort to get past some of my internal demons, I have a fear of doing a lot of overhead hanging exercises and I have to get past those thoughts and fears.

What I do know is that most injuries are stress related.  Stress in your head that affects your body movement, your breathing, and how well your body functions nutritionally.  Compound all of that you get hurt.  There is another component to this in that if you don’t properly warm up, cool down, especially as you get older, you will also most likely get hurt.

About 6 weeks ago I was doing great, hitting it hard, getting some amazing workouts in.  Then I got this crazy idea to lift heavier.  I have been lifting heavy on my lower body so that was no surprise.  The surprise came when I decided to start bench pressing again.  I have not bench pressed other than dumbbells in 10 years.  Started off light, then my next workout I was feeling great so I decided to go heavy.  Bench press itself was amazing, felt great, felt strong, ready to conquer the world.  Did some heavy hang clings to boot.  Later that day, my left chest started to tighten up, my neck started to tighted up, I started to get tingling in my fingers in my left hand, then some shoulder pain to boot.  I was freaking out.

To say this was stressing me out was an understatement.  To add to that, I had some new things happing professionally that created some stress(good stress I thought), and compound all of that, boom…major setback.

I have rehabbed my way back to feeling great again.  I have not bench pressed or hang clinged since.  I have been doing pushups, pullups and some shoulder work though.

Right when I hurt my neck last year, I completed building our Salmon Ladder in our garage.

To give you some perspective on how high it is, it goes up to 11ft.  12ft ceilings.  I did use it while I was hurt last spring, before I knew how serious I was injured.  It has not been used since, that is until last night!  The kids have not been using it because I don’t have the safety mechanism installed yet.  We are getting that done now.

On my way home from work I was thinking I could use a workout.  I get home and Andrew is cranking out a leg workout with some pullups included in the garage and get a huge smile on my face.  So I quickly changed, and headed to the garage to start warming up.  While doing legs and pullups I kept looking at the Salmon Ladder thinking I need to do that soon.  I have been doing some clapping pullups to get used to the motion, however not very many of them.  I was doing 15-20 clapping pullups prior to injury, so to be doing 3-5 now is humbling and yet exciting.

When my workout was done, I looked at Andrew & Ben and said “I am going to do the Salmon Ladder.  I have to get this mental roadblock past me.”  I grabbed the bar, got situated, did the motion like I was going to jump the bar up, then let go.  Looked at my boys and said “I am freaking out, I don’t want to hurt myself or fall.”  The look on their faces told me I had to do it.  I turned back to the bar, grabbed it, hit the first jump, yelled, then hit two more.  I jumped down and starting yelling, YES!  I am BACK!  I felt great.

Today I feel great as well, no neck, arm, hand pain.  It really comes down to stress in my opinion.  Meditation is by far the most impactful thing I do.  I am still an amateur at best, but I do it and it helps me relax, sleep better, and breathe.

Journaling is the other thing that is helping me in my rehab.  It keeps me focused, driven, and it keeps me positive and optimistic about the future.

I will post a video soon of me taking it to the Salmon Ladder in our garage.

To you in health & Abundance,

Steve Aune, Ninsurance Ninja

http://www.ninsuranceninja.com

Back in December, our family decided to do a 365 day Jump Rope Challenge.  Pretty simple process really, everyone jumps rope at least 10-min a day.  Well, at least that is what we thought.

A lot of us think of something to do and we say, “I’d like to do that.”  We say it from the comforts of our nice warm house, in our nice comfortable chair.  What we don’t think about is what it will take to do it.  If it is physically or mentally demanding, are we really prepared for it?

So we start doing what ever it is we set out to do and then as soon as we hit the wall, get mentally fatigued, or experience some sort of pain, we stop.  We stop for any number of reasons.  Fear of getting hurt.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of looking stupid.  Among many others.  We we don’t do is persevere.  Fight through that first wall or that first set of fears to overcome the unknown and create a new reality around it.

Take our jump rope challenge for instance.  Seems pretty simple, jump rope for 10-min a day.  No excuses.  If we are traveling, bring the jump ropes with.  If we are busy, you go jump rope before you go to bed.  In a perfect world, we would jump rope right in the morning and have it done and then not have to think about it again until the next day.  That doesn’t always fit the schedule.

For me, I missed two days right away in January due to the flu.  Yeah, I probably could have tried to gut it out and jump anyway to keep the streak alive, but the thought of puking during and after won.  Along with my bones aching so bad that the jarring of the jump was too much for me to mentally go through.  So I took two days off.  I don’t feel bad for it.  I got right back in the saddle and started a new streak.

Jenny has been rocking the jump roping.  She is so motivated and disciplined that nothing shakes her commitment.  She is the only one to not have missed a day.  Her jump rope skills have improved immensely.  She is enjoying more now than when she started and now she really doesn’t have to think about anymore, she just does it.  Pretty inspiring.  Especially when your garage is not heated and you jump in the garage, you bundle up and get it done anyway!

If you have read my blog at all, you know that about 11 months ago I sustained an injury to my neck that had me take about 9 months off to rehab.  For a couple of months I had a hard time walking without too much pain in my neck and arm.  I have rehabbed through that now and I am back to my workouts and living a pretty normal life.  I say normal because mentally that neck is still there, I can still feel the pain I felt last summer when it felt like I was holding a flame to my left hand every day all day long.  I definitely think twice before I do certain things.

I started jump roping in December and really liked it.  I’ve jump roped a fair amount in my life so I knew what to expect, but I hadn’t jump roped much in the past 6 years or so.  About 40 days in, I was doing my back/pull-up workout and tweaked something in my neck, bringing back a tremendous amount of bad memories.  Needless to say, taking some time off from jumping rope had to happen.  I took two days off again to make sure I didn’t have a relapse of my neck injury.  I believe it was the best decision I could have made.  So I am sticking with it.

After almost 60 days, there are days I feel really strong and love the 15-min of jumping I am doing now, and then there are days when I feel heavy and the 15-min is taking forever.  When I first started, jumping for 10-min was a chore.  I had to stop my watch, take a break, but I was committed to jumping for 10-min.  Now, I can jump for 15-min without stopping.  I am impressed!

I am ready to get back into running, so in order to prepare myself, I have been walking on the treadmill, mostly at a large incline, to get my hips, feet, calves ready for the running.  I have history of blowing up my calves, so my plan is to prevent that from happening.  I journal about it daily, I am creating a new mindset around running and staying healthy.  I run at a cadence of 180 steps per minute.  It has been proven that running at 180/min creates the best running form, reduces injury, and ultimately you will be able to run faster, eventually.

So my jump roping now I am working on jumping at 180 jumps per minute.  Talk about a workout.  I know there are folks who do double unders for 10-min or more at a time, so it isn’t really all that big of a deal to them, but to me it is a really big deal.  15-min of jumping rope at 180/min gets it done.

Here is a short video of what jumping 180/min looks like:

Set a goal, create the habits to be successful, fight through adversity, reap the rewards way farther into the future than you originally imagined.

To your health and abundance,

Steve Aune, Ninsurance Ninja

http://www.ninsuranceninja.com

 

You are where you are today not by accident, but by choice.  You are getting paid today exactly how much you think you are worth.  You are in relationships today exactly how you believe those relationships should be.  You are as healthy as you believe you deserve to be.  Your body weight and your physique are exactly how you see yourself.  You are where you are today financially because of what you believe around money.

WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!

All of this is your self-worth.  At the end of this writing I will share some techniques to increase your SELF-WORTH!  Your self-worth is your identity as to how you see yourself conceptually and when you were born you were perfect.  In fact, you are still perfect today.  When you were born and as you started to grow and experience things, you started to create associations and create memories with emotional attachments.  Think of the next meal, or the hot stove.  Both very memorable and very emotional and you learned from both of them.  My guess is you still have a strong emotional association with the next meal and the hot stove.  That is subconscious programming at work.  90-95% of your daily programming is from the subconscious mind, thus you only have 5-10% conscious thinking to create a new experience/emotion to something new.[i]  Now imagine you have those experiences, associations, and emotions attached to them going on in pretty much every area of your life.  You have an association or emotional memory attached to everything you encounter.  Every time something new, unfamiliar, uncertain is about to happen, you will most likely revert back to safety and let the subconsciousmind take over without even knowing it.

We will be talking financially to prove the point, but this concept can be applied in all areas of your life.  Your associations with money are very powerful and they have been ingrained into your subconscious for a long time.  Think about your perceptions on money.  Does money grow on trees?  Is a penny saved a penny earned?  Should you mind your pennies and everything else will be ok?  Money doesn’t come easily?  These are all stories that we have been told our whole life.

Your personality or who you are is based on how you think, act & feel, creates your reality in how you view things, what you have experienced, and what emotions you attach to those experiences.[ii]  You have over 80,000 thoughts a day.  Think about that.  80,000 thoughts that you are mostly not even considering their impact on you.  They are cemented in your subconscious mind.  Do you suppose most of those thoughts are positive in nature?  As I write this blog I am having negative thoughts around who will want to read it.  We all have a lot of negative self talk going on.  Especially when it comes to experiencing new things.

Let’s talk about income.  You are getting paid today what you believe you are worth.  If you are in sales or in a role where you have the ability to earn more money, you can have a really great quarter and crush it.  You can be on pace to double your income that year.  So let’s say you are used to making $80,000/year and you are on pace to earn $160,000/yr.  Your self-worth is still at $80,000 and if that is all you have ever made and do not really believe you are worth the $160,000, you will start to doubt yourself saying things like “that was a great quarter, I am good, but not that good.”  You will then behave differently and that behavior will take your activities down to a level that is more comfortable for you to believe.  You may increase your income to $100,000, possibly more, but most people will not keep the gas pedal on to hit the $160,000 because they do not feel that they are worth it.

I have seen this countless times in my career and it is spot on.  So now the question is “how long will it take to increase my self-worth?”  That depends.  It depends on several factors:

• How hard are you willing to work on yourself?
• Are you coachable?
• Are you willing to put in the effort to achieve more?
• Do you have the support system in place?

The person that got you to $80,000 in income will not be the same person that takes you to $160,000 in income.  You can do it, you just have to become someone else in the process.  “You have to work harder on yourself than you do at your job,” by Jim Rohn.

Let’s start with the support system, people.  Jim Rohn said, “you are the average of the 5 people you hang around the most.”

Think about that.

• Who are you spending your time with?
• What do they have you doing?
• What do they have you thinking?
• What do they have you saying?
• What do they have you reading?
• Where are they going?
• Is that all ok?

One of the fastest ways to increase your self-worth is to increase the caliber of people you associate with.  There are plenty of negative people out there who want to bring you down to their level so that they will feel better about themselves.  You have to identify those people and avoid them like the plague.  Does this mean you have to alienate some old friendships?  Yes, to a degree.  Darren Hardy said in his book The Compound Effect, “there are 3 minute people in your life, 3 hour people in your life and 3 day people in your life.”  You have to choose wisely on which ones you give your time to.  So you don’t have to alienate them, just limit your exposure to them and know that going into a conversation you may have to respectfully leave early.

Are you coachable?  Are you willing to put in the effort needed?  Do you accept 100% responsibility for where you are today spiritually, mentally, financially, physically, & emotionally.  You need to own your present reality.  This is another key area where people let themselves down.  You are saying to yourself, “I don’t need to do that, it’s just not me.”  “That stuff doesn’t work for me.”  “I don’t have the time to sit for 30-minutes a day and think about what I am thinking about and write out where I want to go, that stuff doesn’t work anyway.”

Start by reading 10-pages a day of really good books.

• Think & Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
• Jim Rohn books
• John Maxwell books
• You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike in a Seminar by David Sandler.
• The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson

Those are all a great start.  Then you have to start to apply what you are learning.

Get really clear on what your life long goals are, what your 5-10 year goals are, and what your 90-day and one year goals are.

Next, think about what you are thinking about.  This is journaling.  Napoleon Hill teaches that you should spend 30-minutes a day thinking about who you intend to become.  This is no small task.  Journaling is the best way to do this daily.

Journaling is not what you probably think it is.  The way we teach it is to write out the person you intend to become in present tense.  Write out your income you expect with a specific date.  Write out the specific time frame you expect that income.  Write out the relationships you intend to have.  Write out the spiritual connection will intend to have.  Write out how much you plan to give back.  Those are examples and once you are clear on who you will become and what you intend to do, then we teach an acronym called B-A-G-E-L-S to keep it simple.

Behaviors:

You’ll want to begin your day by writing down specific activities or actions that you wish to complete, and how they’ll allow you to track towards your short and long-term goals. If you have yet to identify the objectives you want to achieve, start by doing that since your goals should be the basis of your daily actions.

Affirmations/Attitude:

You’ll begin to see that these steps all stack on one another. After you’ve identified how you want to act, consider what beliefs you must adopt to exceed expectations and complete those actions. Affirmations can be simple or complex, depending on what is a motivating factor for you. Experiment with different beliefs and determine which are most effective for you as you pursue your objectives.  Use present tense as if you are already there or in the process of doing it.

Goals:

Speaking of “objectives,” this is the section when you determine the actionable items that you wish to accomplish today. Goals vary from behaviors because they are specific achievements, rather than the actions you must take to achieve them. You are able to complete your goals by changing your behavior.

Evaluation:

As B.A.G.E.L.S. is a daily process, when you get to this step, look at your actions from the day before and determine the achievements and failures you encountered. This step isn’t meant to reward or punish you for performance, but instead serve as a method for tracking your progress towards ultimate success.

Lessons Learned:

This step is a chance to examine your progress and determine what it means for you moving forward. Based on your lessons learned from the previous day, how will that determine your behaviors and goals for the next day? Assess your evaluations and see what valuable insights you can take away from them.

Successes:

Finally, as you wrap up your new daily routine, gauge the level of accomplishment to this point, and determine if you can set your sights even higher going forward. As you progress as a seller and individual, the view of yourself and your industry will change. Be prepared to reassess what you aim to achieve as you progress through your career.

If you do all of this long enough, there is no way you cannot increase your self-worth.  The challenge here is doing it long enough and consistently, and really believing it will work.  Hang around people doing this stuff to help keep you on track.  Find accountability partners or hire a coach.  All top performers have a coach to help them stay true to themselves.

At Life Consuting – A Sandler Training Company, we work with individuals and teams from larger businesses to reinforce what we teach.  We live the process, we execute the little things, we know they all work.  What a lot of people need is the environment to support them and inspire them to do more and be more.

If you have a sales team or you as an individual are struggling with:

• Stagnant growth
• Income ceilings
• Not living your full potential
• You are aspiring to take your game to the next level

Then hiring a great coach and training organization may be exactly what you need.

We are happy to meet and see if we are a good fit or if we should recommend something else.  Not everyone is a good fit for what we do.

Steve Aune

Executive Consultant

Lift Consulting, steve.aune@sandler.com

[i] Dr. Joe Dispenza – Chapter 3 – He references two other books as well, subconscious is 90-95% of your mind. (Dispenza, 2012)

[ii] Dr. Joe Dispenza – Chapter 1 – Dr Dispenza references your personality creates your personal reality.  You are who you are by the associations you have with your past experiences or the experiences of others you trust. (Dispenza, 2012)

You have laid the groundwork for a great 2019. Your corporate/company did a retreat and you came up with a game plan to achieve your company goals. You took the time to have a meeting with your business development team and laid out what their goals/objectives are for the year. You gave a great speech and you were very motivational and inspiring. You really feel like this is the year that your team gets the job done.

As you reflect on 2018, you had a great year, maybe only a good year. What would make 2019 a fantastic year?

Would having your team motivated and committed to achieving their goals be sufficient?

Here are some reasons that we at Lift/Sandler have found that will prevent your team from being fantastic like they should and could be:

1. Your selection process- You don’t have a system in place to effectively select the right candidates. Given the low unemployment rates right now, hiring is a high priority for everyone and this causes people to rush their hiring process, if they have one, and make a bad selection. The person may be a good person and may deserve a seat on your bus, just not your sales bus. We coach companies how to do this effectively or do it for them.

2. Your goals- your company goals automatically become the salesperson’s goals. This does not give the salesperson any ownership or emotional connection to the goals that they have been given. There is a better approach to this and it can be very rewarding, however, it does take more work on the leadership part. When the going gets tough, when they face rejection, what will motivate them to keep on pushing through that negativity? There is the 10% that will figure it out and make it happen. The rest I suppose you have turned over year after year, that does sound expensive. Have your team get crystal clear on their short-term goals/desires, and their longer-term goals/desires. Fully understand where they want to go and help them get

there. Have them put together what they want to do for the year and see how that aligns with your corporate objectives. My experience has shown that they always come up with larger goals if they are their own and they own them.

3. No specific cookbook – you don’t have your team following a specific prospecting plan that has been developed through trial and error. You are not tracking enough matrix to fully understand what it takes daily to achieve the results necessary. We tend to be overly optimistic about how good we are and thus we don’t do enough to get the results. Don’t expect newer sales associates to know what it takes to get the results, you may have to dictate those activities in the beginning. If you are a new business with a new team, then you are starting from scratch and how you track and measure becomes paramount to building a lasting sales process for the future.

4. Trainer – Coach – Supervisor – Mentor – How much time should you be spending in each role as a leader? Most leaders we come across confuse the different roles. Training is very different from coaching. Supervising is different than mentoring. Focusing on what each individual needs is the key to knowing where to spend your time effectively.

5. Too infrequent meetings – I know you are thinking the last thing I need is more meetings. However, when it comes to your sales team, they need that time and you need that time to keep them on track as well. They don’t have to be that long, supervisor meetings are 5-10 minutes. Did you do the job or not. Training and coaching can take more time and should be scheduled as such. Quite a few leaders think their sales team is like them when they were selling and nothing could be further from the truth. Most likely hardly any of them will be like the leader, thus individual coaching- mentoring- training is best.

6. You focus too much on results – the reasons stated above, quite a few leaders don’t have the patience to truly mentor and train effectively and expect salespeople to “get it” faster. While that can work for the 10%, you will be missing out on some very talented people who would excel with the right leadership from you. If you only focus on results, you are missing the whole process. Have your team follow a process, evaluate them on the process. If the process does not get the results, then you don’t have a results issue, you have a process issue.

7. You aren’t celebrating failure – in sales, we face a lot of rejection, a lot of negativity, and if we only focus on results, we tend to forget what it takes to get the results and celebrate those failures. Celebrate the rejections. Celebrate every NO they get because they are then one more NO closer to a yes.

8. You are using the year as a measurement- it has been proven over and over that people can only go hard for short periods of time. By short periods I mean a quarter at a time. So having goals broken down into quarterly goals and then taking a week to assess the activity to results, reviewing your key performance indicators and adjusting either the activity or reducing/increasing goals for the next quarter. That way your year will not get away from you.

9. You don’t have a Leadership cookbook- just as you would have your sales team have a cookbook for prospecting and doing their job, you as the leader should have a leadership/management cookbook to handle your team.

To be an effective sales leader or owner of a company who has salespeople, there are a lot of hats to wear and coming up with your own leadership cookbook will save you time and frustration in leading a team of sales people.

At Lift Consulting, we specialize in finding your blind spots in your sales leadership role, which once identified and corrected, will make you a more effective sales leader, thus your sales team will get better too.

Please reach out to us to see if there is a fit to work together.

Steve Aune, Executive Consultant

Lift Consulting, LLC

steve.aune@sandler.com

10 years ago I started this blog.  It is hard to believe that it has been that long and the time has passed so fast.  Abundance Attitude was birthed by my desire to focus on a positive attitude towards abundance.  Abundance can take many forms.  If you read my first blog it is amazing how much I believe the same stuff and follow the same principals.  A lot has changed, yet some things have not changed much at all.  My first book is still a start up with several pages written.  I have since started another book that I intend to finish this year by writing at least 3 days a week, 30 min each day.

You are where you are today, spiritually, financially, relationally, mentally, physically, civically, & emotionally because of your beliefs about yourself.  Do your beliefs come from abundance or scarcity?  Look at each area and really think about how you think about each one.  I am willing to bet that there is some scarcity thinking going on at some level in each one.  I know I have them.  I can and do identify with them.  By recognizing how I think about each area today allows me to write that down and then start programming a new way of thinking about them.  Raising my level of abundance little by little.

Having an abundance attitude takes faith.  Faith in knowing that better things are coming.  Faith in believing that by sharing I am actually getting more in return.  Faith in that there are really good people out there who truly want the very best for you and your life.  Faith that God has your back and he will not let you down no matter how hard things get for you.

Having an abundance attitude means learning from experiences.  Learning from successes and learning from failures and mistakes.  Every life experience good or bad is a great learning opportunity.  You may think that the world is against you, God is not helping you, everything is going the wrong way.  The reality is God is trying to teach you something, or God is putting you through this for you to learn from it, find the good in it and bring that goodness to life.  You see it in all kinds of success stories about how people are down in the dumps, things seem to be so horrible that they can hardly imagine anything worth living.  Then, they come alive, they’ve hit the bottom and now instead of staying at the bottom, they bounce back stronger than ever with a desire to make a bigger impact.  God at work!

What ever you are going through, someone else has gone through it and persevered.  Know that having an abundance attitude is the key to moving forward.

Seek abundance in your health & happiness.  Seek abundance in your work and financial life.  Seek abundance in your civic obligations and how much you give and how much you serve those less fortunate.  Seek abundance in God the Father Almighty.  Seek abundance in your relationships, the people you love and your friendships.

Abundance is yours for the taking, start believing today!

To your health & abundance,

Steve Aune, Ninsurance Ninja

http://www.ninsuranceninja.com