Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (21 page)

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mentor at the right time can save you from countless mistakes and years of hard work.

At each stage of your life you can benefit from the advice and experience of someone who is further along the path than you. The men who have been there to give me guidance and advice as I have grown up and gone into business at various levels have affected my life dramatically. This type of relationship can have a major impact on your success as well.

Many people are a little bit fuzzy about exactly how mentoring relationships work. A mentor is like an uncle. He or she is an older friend, someone wiser and more experienced than you, who will give you guidance and advice from time to time. A mentor can help you avoid pitfalls that might sidetrack your career or hold you back.

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DEVELOP A STRATEGY

As it happens, the best potential mentors are successful people who are already very busy. Approaching one of them requires strategy and planning. Here is what you do.

When you decide that you would like a particular person to be your mentor in a particular area, you should contact that person with a specific question or need. Most successful people are open to helping other people who want to be successful as well, but they are busy. They don’t have a lot of time. You should not ask for more than 10 minutes.

The best way to approach a prospective mentor for the first time is with a short list of key questions for which you need answers to help you to make current decisions in your life and your career. Do not approach a mentor asking personal questions about his or her life and experiences. Busy people are not interested in sharing their innermost experiences and feelings with someone they have never met before.

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LOOK FOR COMPATIBILITY

In your first meeting, by asking a few specific questions, you are test-ing the waters. What you are looking for is a certain form of
chemistry
.

You are looking for a person you like and respect and feel comfortable with, and who likes you and will be willing to help you in the future.

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For this reason, you must go slowly at first. You must ask for only a few minutes, and then you must get on with your business.

You must ask for specific advice about a specific situation. Be respectful, friendly, and businesslike.

Here is the key to developing the mentor/mentee relationship.

When you are given advice, follow it. Don’t ask for specific advice and do nothing with it, and then attempt to come back for even more advice. This just demonstrates to the prospective mentor that you are wasting his or her time.

Instead, if the person suggests that you take a particular action, do it immediately. If the mentor suggests that you read a book, get it and read it. If he suggests that you listen to an audio program, get it and listen to it. If she suggests that you take a particular course, sign up for it and attend.

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BE RESPECTFUL OF THEIR TIME

Many people contact me and ask me to be a mentor to them, not only from throughout the United States and Canada but from for-eign countries as well. Aside from the fact that I am extremely busy, I respectfully decline all invitations because of the particular approach that they usually take. They call up or write and want me to take complete charge of their lives. They want me to spend many hours of my time guiding, counseling, and directing them, and helping them in their jobs or careers.

The fact is that a prospective mentor is usually very busy and cannot even consider the possibility of spending large blocks of time with a complete stranger.

However, if you go slowly and you follow the advice given to you by a mentor, the individual may conclude that investing time in you is worthwhile. He or she will be willing to spend even more time with you to help you even further. Eventually, a very good relationship can develop.

You may have more than one mentor at the same time, and you may have sequential mentors. This means that as one mentor serves his or her purpose in guiding you, and you evolve and grow in your career, it will often be time to move on to another mentor who is even further along than your first mentor.

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RESIST RELATIONSHIP ENTROPY

The natural tendency in all relationships is toward
entropy
. Relationship entropy means that relationships run out of energy unless they are continually renewed. People stop doing the things that they had done earlier to establish the relationship in the first place. They work very hard to create the relationship, and then they take it for granted. They forget to communicate with the other person. They just assume that everything is going along fine and that no extra efforts are necessary to maintain the relationship. As it happens, men are more likely than women to let this happen.

But all relationships are a function of the time invested in them.

You can only increase the value of a relationship by investing more time in it. This applies to a relationship with your spouse, relationships with your children, relationships with your staff members, and especially relationships with your friends and associates on a personal and professional level.

There is no alternative to personal time invested in building and maintaining a relationship. You must be alert to the danger of relationship entropy and be constantly working to counter it.

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CUSTOMERS FOR LIFE

It is quite common in business for someone to work very hard to win a customer for the first time and to build the initial relationship.

However, once the relationship is established, the businessperson begins to take the customer for granted and go off to work on new relationships that are not yet well established. Then, six months later, the businessperson is astonished to find that the customer has gone to a competitor.

As a businessperson, your customer relationships are some of the most important assets that you develop and maintain over the course of your career. Once you have invested the time and energy required to develop a customer relationship, it is essential that you develop a plan for relationship maintenance. You make sure that you are doing whatever is necessary to keep that relationship alive and growing.

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THE LAW OF INDIRECT EFFORT

There are several principles that apply to building and maintaining relationships of all kinds. Perhaps the most important is the Law of Indirect Effort. This law says that
you achieve things with people more
indirectly than directly.
Here are some examples of this principle.

If you want to
have a friend
, the direct way is by trying to get people to like you. This seldom works. The indirect way is to
be a
friend
, to treat other people in a friendly way without expecting anything in return.

If you want to
impress
other people, the direct way is to tell them about your accomplishments and show them how clever you are.

The indirect way, which is faster and more effective, is to be
impressed
by them. The more you show that you are impressed by someone, the more they will find you to be an impressive person.

The indirect way of getting people to like you is for you to like them
first
. The way to get people to admire and respect you is for you to admire and respect them in advance.

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THE LAW OF COMPENSATION

The Law of Compensation seems to apply directly to relationships.

This law says that you get out what you put in, and
the more you put
in, the more you get out
. The more things that you do for other people, the more things other people will want to do for you. When you offer to help or serve others, they will want to help or serve you.

What goes around comes around. Whatever you sow you will eventually reap.

We have entered into the era of the “go-giver” rather than just the go-getter. Each person has a deep desire to reciprocate in his or her relations with others. We want to even things up when anything nice has been done for us. We want to pay people back for any kindnesses or favors. We don’t want to feel that we are obligated to another.

Nowhere is this principle more important than in relationships.

There are many people who think that the key to success is to get around other successful people and then to exploit this relationship. This strategy seldom works. It is much better for you to become the kind of person that other people want to be around. When ccc_tracy_7_118-135.qxd 6/23/03 2:48 PM Page 134

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you go to work on yourself and become a better person, better people will want to associate with you. This is the indirect way.

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MARRY RICH

Sometimes people say they want to marry a rich person. If you want to marry a rich person, by the law of indirect effort you had better get busy working on yourself to become the kind of man or woman that a rich person would want to marry. You should become very good at what you do, and develop the manners of an excellent person. Improvement of your life and prospects on the outside begins with your getting better on the inside.

There have been many studies of social climbers, people who have joined clubs and organizations in an attempt to associate with other successful people. Invariably they fail. Why? Because
like attracts like
.

People are naturally attracted to people who are at the
same level
that they are. If you have not developed yourself to achieve a certain level of accomplishment in your field, you cannot take a shortcut and begin associating with people at that new higher level.They will not be interested in you, and you will only end up looking and feeling foolish.

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RELATIONSHIPS ARE EVERYTHING

Keep it foremost in your mind that relationships are everything.

Your job is to become a
relationship-creating
individual. You should look for every way possible—in your personal reference groups, in your mastermind networks, in your clubs and associations, and with mentors—to form and maintain high-quality relationships.

Most successful men and women owe their success to the fact that, at an earlier time, they made the effort to establish and maintain a particular relationship that eventually paid off for them.

Doors were opened and opportunities created that saved them years of hard work. And this can happen to you as well, if you use creative networking at every stage of your career.

When you know that your Rolodex contains hundreds of valuable names that you can call upon because you have already built a bridge with these people, it gives you a tremendous feeling of personal power and self-confidence.You begin to feel
unstoppable
.

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ACTION EXERCISES

1.
Make a list of 10 people whom it would be helpful for you to know. Write each of them a letter congratulating them on something they have just done.

2.
Select three people with whom you can form a business/career type of mastermind group. Invite them to meet with you weekly for breakfast or lunch.

3.
Join at least one association that holds regular meetings in your community and begin attending every one. Volunteer to serve on one of the committees, and get involved.

4.
Examine each of the people with whom you regularly associate, in business or socially. Are these the right people for you to have as members of your reference group?

5.
Develop a personal development plan to prepare yourself to become the kind of person that you would like to meet and spend time with. Take control of your own future.

6.
Take a Dale Carnegie course in public speaking, or join a chapter of Toastmasters International. Learn to speak on your feet.

7.
Resist relationship entropy; keep in regular touch with the most important people in your personal and business life. Call or visit someone today.

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C h 8

a p t e r

Think Like a Genius

Make every thought, every fact, that comes into your
mind pay you a profit. Make it work and produce for you.

Think of things not as they are but as they might be.

Don’t merely dream—but create!

—Maxwell Maltz

You are a
potential
genius.Your amazing brain has more than 18 billion cells, each one of which is connected to and interlinked with as many as 20,000 others. This means that the number of possible thoughts you can think is greater than all the molecules in the known universe.

You have the capacity to learn at incredible rates and to retain more information than you can even imagine. It is said that
“when
an educated person dies, it is as if a library burned down.”
This potential library is contained between your ears.

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THE ORIGINS OF WEALTH

Throughout human history, value has been contained in land, labor, capital, furniture, fixtures, machinery, and other
hard assets
.

Wars and revolutions have been fought over their control. The primary creators of value were those people who could combine these various resources together to produce products and services for the marketplace.

In the twentieth century, however, we have seen change take
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