Conditioning, conditioning, conditioning. It’s not just a mantra for athletes. In the Millionaire Mind, we go marathon – the distance of life – not a race to a million. It’s not something to train for occasionally. It’s something we live consistently, yes?

Even if we’re not always at peak level – and there will be times when we’re just not – there’s something that’s motivating us, something that’s fueling us. What we’re fueling up with will determine whether or not we go the distance.

The juice that fuels us is our motivations – why we’re doing what we do. And there’s really only two ways to go here. You’re either doing what you do based on a positive energy juice or negative energy. Both can be extremely effective. Both can get you far, but the difference in the end: are you going to arrive where you intended to go, and what kind of condition are you going to be in when you get there?

People who run on negative energy juice do things like make pretty decent amount money but get rid of it because it was angry energy that got them there; they were rebelling against something, or someone (usually a parent). Except when they get rid of it now they’re BROKE and angry! They got rid of the wrong one.

Others are so fearful that there will never be enough money – or they will never be enough – that the insecurity shifts their focus away from the other areas of life. Their insecurity erodes their physical, mental, and emotional condition.

Fear can be useful when it comes to getting our butts in gear when we know we have to get it done. But when we’re acting on imaginary pain – pain based on negative conditioning that fuels negative motivations – that kind of fear acts more like an obstacle to our happiness rather than an efficient fuel source.

How about these for motivations: joy and purpose! Loving what you do! Contributing to something beyond yourself and the money is the result. Good or good?

If you’re not juiced by joy and purpose, it ain’t gonna work, not for the distance anyway. You can get short burst of success based on anger or fear, but these create stress. You might win the game financially for a short period of time, but you won’t be rich on a spiritual, emotional and mental level.

You cannot have enough money to not be angry anymore. No amount of money will lessen fear because fear is the habitual fuel and money is the prop. You can never alleviate the fear with more money or more of anything. What you have to alleviate is the fear itself. Change your fuel! We want money and happiness. The only way that can happen is if you’re running on supportive juice, not fuel that’s going to lead to a crash and burn.

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If you’re going to make money, come up with a couple of motivations that are supportive. There’s always family, obligation, more toys or material things—but what are some motivations that really touch the core of our greatest joys in life? What are some different types of juice that relate to happiness beyond “I have to do this” or material comforts? We want to hear from you!

 
To Your Success,

“If I could teach my children only one thing, it would be the skill of marketing. For with that skill, they could be successful at anything they chose for the rest of their lives.”

That’s a quote from financial advisor Howard Ruff. It speaks for itself — if you can market yourself, you will always have potential buyers for whatever it is you have to offer.

This is what scares so many people, though. They think you have to know everything about marketing in order to be good at it.

I'm gonna let you in on a little secret:

I don’t know everything about marketing, not by a long-shot! I don’t have time to know everything, nor do I need to, nor do you!

However, there are some critical secrets to great marketing and that includes the four most important words in marketing.


The Four Most Important Words In Marketing

1. PRESENTING

You’ve got to let people know what you have — your Unique Selling Proposition.

Without marketing, nobody knows that you or your product exists. If they don’t know about it, they can’t buy it.  And if they don’t know why they might want it, they certainly won’t.

2. POTENTIAL

Make sure there is a real possibility of a transaction happening.

If they can’t or won’t buy it, you make no money.

3. EAGER

Create desire for your product or service.

At its most basic, marketing is presenting products or services to potential consumers to make them eager to buy from you. It’s about the psychology of putting yourself in front of others effectively and creatively.

4. BUY

If people don’t buy your product, all this is for naught.

Sometimes it helps to go back to the basics, especially core basics. This has to be engrained in every cell in our bodies


Marketing Equals Money

Marketing equals money, and this principle works for all businesses!

If you are a great marketer, chances are you will make great money. And if you are a poor marketer, chances are you will struggle financially.

The good news is marketing is a learnable skill and there aren't that many different strategies and principles that you need to know to become an expert at marketing. You just need to know the right elements that will have the biggest impact on your business and your bottom line.

Which is why I created my free web class, The 500 Million Dollar Secret, to give you the key elements I used to get rich.

Click here to register for the class and select a date and time that works best for you. See you there!

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How great that you can live your mission and not ever worry about how you’re going to make money! What does or will that look like for you? Share your thoughts with me in the comments below!

For Your Freedom,

Last month we explored how sometimes we just need to be able to identify what we’re frustrated at in order to begin addressing it. When there are consistent frustrations in a business, we can usually address them by putting systems in place that minimize inconsistencies and produce more of the results we’re really looking for.

It’s another one of those no-duh, no brainers that may not appear like much until those frustrations build to the point of blinding us from the most direct solutions.

But we now want to articulate the impact of that frustration on our business condition. How does this thing impact you? What results aren’t you getting? What’s happening? What’s not happening that you want to happen, or don’t want to happen?

We don’t want to be working on anything that doesn’t really matter. If you’re frustrated because your partner starts their day later than you do, does it really matter as long as the work is getting done? But if that lateness means missing calls from earlier time zones, that could have an impact, yes?

So it’s one thing to name a frustration, and it’s another to know exactly what that frustration translates into toward your bottom line. You’ve got to probe, measure, and quantify that frustration. You might find at the end of the day, you’re really getting bothered over something trivial—or you could find that your frustrations are indeed warranted.

If you have a complex system you’re looking at, this process can take months. So how about a more simple formula?

“The real problem in my business is the absence …” It could be a system that will cost effectively generate leads rather than be a costly guessing game every time. Or a system that staff can follow consistently rather than doing it their own way each time, producing mediocre or inconsistent results. Or it could be the absence of a system for strategic planning rather than primarily responding to a competitor’s moves.

It’s just a generic way of focusing. You’re not actually formulating a system yet. What you’ll find is some of these things that you describe can actually be purchased as software programs, or you can easily hire consultants who do them much better than you would. But once you’ve figured out what the problem actually is, reformulating starts to become easier.

“The real problem in my business is the absence of a system that will …” Fill in the blank with that generic system solution and then write down your original frustrating condition.

You should start to feel a shift in your energy in terms of some of these things that are frustrating you. The question that you simply have to ask now is: Is this frustration worth fixing? Is this frustration that you named—if it’s not stemming from within you—something you have to address quickly or is it lower on the priority scale?

Do you really want to remedy this frustrating condition or would you rather just live with it? That’s the question that you have to answer.

What do you think? What are some frustrating aspects of running a business that you’ve encountered, and how did you remedy them? Did you find value in naming and understanding the impact of those frustrations? Were some of them really nothing? Make sure to leave me a comment and let me know your experiences with frustrations in business (and how you handled them) – or even how you handled frustration and overcame it in other parts of your life!

For Your Freedom,

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There’s no way around it: those who aren’t extraordinary athletes or entertainers but who still want to get rich have to get good at sales. Whatever that may be, even for artists, or whoever. You have to more specifically not only get good at sales, but good at closing sales.

Now how do you close a sale? There’s three or four ways to do it. The best way is the invitational close. ‘Do you like this? How does this sound?’ You invite feedback. ‘If it sounds pretty good, why don’t you give it a try?’ Assume that when you’ve answered a question or an objection, it’s the equivalent of them having decided to buy.

Or you can use what’s called an alternative close. ‘Would you prefer this or that?’ You offer a choice between A or B. The probability of them picking one or the other goes up dramatically if they have a choice, and whichever one they say ‘Yes’ to, you’ve made a sale.

Here’s a neat trick from one of the masters, Brian Tracy: if you get the customer to give you a single piece of information, you’ve successfully used the power of suggestion. ‘How do you spell your last name exactly?’ If they give you the spelling of their last name, they’ve bought the product. It’s very powerful.

In the end, the most important quality for sales success is boldness. All qualities are habits, habits of thought and action. Because of childhood conditioning, we have these fears of failure and rejection, but those are learned because children have no fears. We learn them as we grow up, but that also means we can unlearn them. The way you unlearn the fear of failure and rejection is by doing the opposite of what you would do in a failure or rejection situation.

When we back away from the fear, it grows and grows. Soon it dominates our whole life, and it paralyzes us. But when you confront the fear; when you do the thing you fear, it gets smaller and smaller and becomes manageable. So for the rest of your life, you make a habit of doing the thing you fear. You make a habit of confronting the fear.

Pretty soon, you develop the habit of courage. You reach the point where you’re not afraid of anything. The key to your success as a person and as an entrepreneur is to develop the habit of courage. The way that you do it is every single time you feel a little bit scared or nervous, you attack. You move toward the fear situation. You pick up the phone. You make the call. You knock on the door. You ask for the order.

Whenever you feel afraid, do the thing you fear. In a week, a month, a year from now, your fears will diminish. As your fears go down, your confidence and your self esteem go up, and you start to feel fabulous about yourself. You start to feel unstoppable.

What were some of the fears you’ve had to overcome in your life that held you back from success? What once seemed like a mountain but now more resembles a molehill? Give us your feedback. We want to hear from you!

For Your Freedom,

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“Can you hear me now? Good!”

I’m a marketing fanatic as many of you know, so I try to appreciate great ideas communicated brilliantly when I see it. Verizon’s cell phone television ad campaign articulated and took advantage of a simple but powerful truth— with other cell phone carriers, lots of people were experiencing the frustration of dropped calls in the middle of important conversations.

You’ll never have to worry about that with us, Verizon basically said, with commercial after commercial of the same Verizon field test guy in the most remote areas of the country still being heard, still good.

The number of Verizon subscribers jumped from 32.2 million at the start of that campaign in January 2002 to 43.8 million in two years. They also poured billions into their network infrastructure; continually investing in what they said they would deliver on—fewer dropped calls anywhere.

I’m not a Verizon spokesman or advocate, I just use the example to illustrate the power of a simple message communicated to the tune of more customers, and more money. The money is in the message. Marketing and promotion is how you get customers to your business, and customers are how you get more money.

This is exactly the problem most businesses have, though—communicating clearly and concisely what they do and how it benefits their potential customers. It’s one thing for you to know what you do, who you help and how they benefit, but it’s quite another thing for other people to know the same thing.

One of the most essential skills you can have is the ability to articulate what you do in a powerful and concise way. Clarity leads to power, for both you and your customers. It empowers them to understand exactly what you can do for them and why they should buy from you. The reason most people fail in business is that they have a very poor message.

Your message has to cut through like a knife to the core. You have to be very selective and specific about what you say. You might have lots of different things to offer, but you can’t put them all in a 30-second sound bite. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Keep it simple. Less is more. You want to leave people saying, “That sounds interesting.”

What’s your “thumbprint”? What’s unique about you? Why should someone do business with you versus the person next door?

If you don’t have this, you are chopping your income in half. As soon as you have a strong sound bite, and deliver on your promise, you can double your income.

The only way you'll ever know what works is to try something out and see if it works. You always test first, and then you sprint out of the gate when you have a winning proposition.

How about you? Have you experienced a difference in success when you changed your persona—your “calling card” so to speak—as you sold yourself or a product? What was it that specifically made a difference? Was it how you perceived yourself or how others perceived you? Let us know in the comments below!

To Your Success,

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As 2014 has swiftly arrived, we are brought to that time of the season when most of us take to planning and plotting the next 12 months of our lives. If you’re already considering your to-do lists and new years resolutions, then you’re on the right track, but you’ll need to be careful in making your plans in order to be sure that you’re able to use them to your advantage!

Set Goals

The first rule of making progress in anything you do is setting goals, allowing yourself to always have a finish line in sight. This provides a boost in motivation during those moments when slogging forward seems impossible, giving you something tangible to work towards at every moment.

Whether you’re planning positive changes to your work or personal life, take note of the things that you want to achieve by the end of the year, and what you’ll need to do in order to get there. With these goals firmly in heart and mind, you’ll have just what you need to propel you in the right direction.

But wait…

Set Reasonable Goals

Goals are great, but what if those goals are only barely achievable? Like a high-risk gambler, you stand to gain the most when you meet sky-high expectations, but your chances of any success at all are well below par.

In order to limit your risk of perceived failure, be sure not to aim too high when setting your goals. Take the time to consider your history and your present circumstances, planning to hit milestones that are within reach instead of shooting for the stars and coming up short.

That’s not to say that you’ll never reach the stars, mind you – only that you’ll need to get to them in incremental steps.

Set Reasonable, Incremental Goals

Alright, you’ve got goals set that are useful, reachable, and will serve to take your endeavors to the next level throughout 2014. With the whole year plotted out ahead of you, it may seem that you’re ready to close the books on another successful year planned and get started with the heavy lifting.

 Not so fast.

You may feel particularly pumped up about achieving your goals now, but what about that inevitable day when inspiration is lacking and your goals seem further away than they did the day before? Whether it’s a day, a week, or a month away, that time will come, and you’ve got to narrow your plans even further if you want to get yourself on the right track without fear of hitting a serious bump.

Overarching goals are a necessary thing when you’re taking in the big picture, but life isn’t a big picture; on the contrary, life happens minute by minute, and that means that you’ll also need a more focused view. In order to achieve maximum momentum and build the kind of habits that lead to long-term success, be sure to set incremental goals that take you from point to point towards the place you visualize yourself being at the end of 2014.

No matter what your goals are and what aspect of your life they apply to, good planning and hard work will get you there – good luck!

What are your plans to make 2014 the most successful year of your life? Let us know in the comments below the specific routes you’ll be taking towards improved finances, better health, stronger relationships, and increased happiness, helping others to follow in your footsteps!

 

Happy New Year!

For Your Freedom,

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Think back to a time in your past—five, 10, 15, or even 20 years ago. Maybe you envisioned a happy future making more money, having more fun, a family of your own, or living in a bigger place than you did previously.

Few things turn out perfectly, but chances are that at least one area of your life saw some growth and improvement. The standards of a 30 or 40-something-year-old adult are going to be necessarily different than those of a late teenager. In that sense, most of us have undergone economic, personal, and career upgrades, even if you might be disappointed with the outcome thus far.

All life on this planet goes through seasons. We’ll experience spring-like blooms, the reaping of summer, the preparations of fall, and the chill and severity that winter brings. These cycles affect us individually and globally. Overall, the world is experiencing something akin to a severe economic winter.

However, if we can remember that we’ve all experienced times of growth and improvement in our individual lives after a period of lack and want, we can re-adjust back to a mindset that focuses on a future we can look forward to again. That starts with accepting and embracing the now.

By far, the toughest cycle we’ll experience are our “winter times,” whether it’s cold outside or not. Even  the grasshopper needs to be told by the Ant to prepare for winter, so the old story goes. The other seasons are easier if not more enjoyable.

As tough as things can seem during harsh times, winter provides opportunity to recover and start planning for the next spring ahead—the same kind of spring that gave us relief before and will bring us relief again.

You can do this by defining what you want to create. Be specific. Sometimes luck helps, but there’s no way to get what you want until you’ve defined what that is, and, just as important, why you want it. Your motivations will steer you through any winter storm.

Also, taking inventory. List those attributes that enhance the quality of your life right here and now—family, friends, the network of colleagues who might help you take that next step; resources that are helping you economically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. You might be surprised at just how many resources are at your disposal.

Lastly, be grateful. For every “negative” thing that may be happening to you, someone else is undergoing more pressing challenges. Gratitude has a way of dispelling fear, anxiety, and a self-defeating attitude. You can’t focus on what you don’t have when you’re grateful for what you do have. How we progress through the seasons isn’t based on what we don’t have, or what we might’ve done or not done in the past. It’s about how we use what we do have now, sowing seeds of growth that we can reap later.

Winters can seem to go on forever, but they don’t. Somewhere, right now, someone is enjoying summer. That’s as true for the world as it is in our individual lives. When in winter, use this time to re-focus, heal, enjoy your blessings, and start planning your next spring now.

Give us your thoughts on life’s “seasons,” whether they apply to your personal or professional lives. Where are you in your life’s cycle? How do you navigate your seasons? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think. Each and every one of your comments is meaningful and valuable.

Happy Holidays!

For Your Freedom,

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Whether you’re rich now, on your way to being rich, or just thinking about it, everyone has fantasized about what it would be like for money—or rather lack of it—not to be a problem.

Most people stay in the realm of fantasy, maybe dipping out occasionally to buy a lottery ticket. Another group, not satisfied with the 9 to 5 grind, takes a few more risks and pours their energy into business ideas, opportunities and companies. Most will fail within three to five years.

But there are those fewer people with the skill (which can be learned through modeling), willpower and creativity who are successful. There is another attribute, though, that separates them from the poor, and that is intention.

Most people say their financial goal is to make money. Yes or yes? That’s a good reason, but the issue is that’s not specific enough. If you have a wishy-washy intention, you’re going to get a wishy-washy result.

Rich Business People Have Three Financial Intentions:

  1. To have a very high working income

  2. To create passive income

  3. Dramatically enhance the value of their company

What’s the intention that poor people have? To earn a living. To earn a decent living. That’s what they’re in business for. They don’t even consider they’re in a business as a way to create passive income and even more importantly to create wealth.

A business is not a job. A business is too much work with too many challenges to just go out there to earn a decent living.

The business is designed to be a vehicle to set you free and create nothing short of wealth! Rich people understand that business is simply two components: either buy or create something and sell it for more than it costs you. That’s it!

Most broke people have struggles, put most of their energy and attention not on the buying, creating, and selling but on the administrative and operations arena—the organizing of those two things—and that is a mistake.

Operations are very important, but it’s not the essence of the business. Go back to the cave people: ‘Here’s a piece of meat. I want your stick.’ That’s it! There’s no customer service. There’s no tech support. There’s no finance department. There’s no reporting. There’s no furniture and there’s no computers. ‘Your stick, my meat! Let’s go!’ That’s business!

Buying and creating and selling. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

This knowledge helps focus the intention of why we’re talking millionaire success strategies. The basics help, but the intention has to come from the simplest truth. When we’re going into business, we’re not going halfway. You could, but would that be much better than working a typical job?

When we’re talking about our money blueprints, these basics of why we go into business have to be drawn up into the foundation. It’s so simple and powerful yet not very well understood. Knowing this helps put you back into focus when the inevitable challenges arise, or when you face disappointments and setbacks.

You are doing this because you are going to be rich! Whatever other intentions are attached to that—for family, to buy nice things, to travel, to be an artist, whatever—don’t have to conflict with this truth.

You are doing this to be rich and to be free!

Now it’s your turn!  What are you financial intentions?  Are they wishy-washy and you need to change them now?  Are they solid and moving you forward?  Share below—I want to hear from you!

For Your Freedom,

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Think back to those times in your life that proved to be pivotal moments in your growth as a person. Maybe it had to do with your finances, or your spirituality, or something you were trying to accomplish or overcome.

How did you learn how to get to where you wanted to be? Where did you learn what you needed to know? Who did you learn from, or was it all trial and error?

Lots of people start down their path toward whatever success means to them, not having any clue as to how tough that road can be. If they did have a clue in the beginning, a good number would say, “No thanks, I’ll stay ‘comfortable’ over here.” It’s almost like telling the universe you don’t want any good luck—those unexpected things that you hear about happening to other people that changes their lives in ways they couldn’t have imagined. Chance favors the prepared and courageous mind—those who are unafraid to take risks.

The outcomes of those risks partly reflect the knowledge that went into those decisions and actions, and that too reflects where that knowledge came from. When it comes down to it, few who have reached extraordinary levels of success in a given area did so because they learned everything they needed to learn on their own. Even the Buddha followed several mentors before moving beyond them to reach Nirvana.

I believe that life is always giving us turning points big and small—opportunities to change how we see things, change how we go about reaching our goals—especially when the way we’ve been going about it isn’t getting us any closer to the objective. It can be something as simple as the friend who casually mentions the name of an author who they think would be of value to you at that time in your life—or it could be the direct advice of a trusted someone when you have an important decision to make.

So take note when a good friend drops an observation about a question or issue you’re considering. There’s that little voice sometimes in the back of our head that might discredit what others see about ourselves or our situations that we’re not seeing.

You might think you don’t need to hear it, but we all know about our own thoughts sometimes, yes? They’re not always supportive. Just because you think, “I have this under control—I don’t need to hear anybody else’s perspective” does not make it true. It’s quite often the opposite.

So it’s up to you to choose a perspective of where you are today, not where you were yesterday. You don’t know where you are today until you show up. Come from the present moment, be in the present moment, and then choose to see how you can utilize the guidance that I believe life is giving us all the time. Ask the universe for guidance, and you will receive it. You never know which “today” could provide your life’s next turning point.

What do you think? How have seemingly inconsequential encounters changed your life, or your perspective? For better or worse? Was the presence of a mentor involved? What did you learn from this? Share your thoughts and opinions with our community, you never know whose life you may be changing!

For Your Freedom,

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There are internal principles we use to create whatever we want to create. You’ve got to be congruent with who you are; an honest statement to yourself and to the world. You can’t get wealthy if you’re not congruent with that.

We have this desire to be financially free, but there’s this other part that says, ‘It’ll make my life more complicated,’ or ‘I don’t deserve to be.’

‘God doesn’t want me to.’

‘Mommy doesn’t want me to.’

‘The government doesn’t want me to.’

That never ends until you change the tune. You need to decide on something you’re going to do. Get congruent about it and go get it done. Take action on it.

There’s a saying I think is one of the most profound sayings I’ve ever heard by Émile Coué: “When the will comes into conflict with the imagination, the imagination always wins.”

It means you may want to do something, you may will it, you may write it down as a goal, you may say to yourself ‘That’s what I want to do’, but if your imagination is not congruent with that desire, you will conform to your imagination about it—even if you’re imagining the worst.

The deepest parts of you know what is right for you. That’s what intuition is. The problem is following your intuition can sometimes be a very fearful thing because you’re usually going against everything that everybody else is telling you. They’re usually saying, “Don’t do it.” You have to know and affirm that it’s right for you. It’s your thing. You’ve got to do this.

You would worry a lot less about what people think of you if you realized how little they do. But we have this façade we put up around ourselves, yes or yes? We try to play a role. And this façade takes half of our energy.

Fear is the most expensive habit we have. How much does your fear cost you? Go back five years and change your life, take all the fear away. No more fear of rejection. Live five years forward up to today without that fear. Where would you be today?

If you move and act in a different way, in a more congruent way, in a less fearful way, what happens? If we could take all of that and put it into money and relationships, time and physical health?

The question isn’t meant to draw thoughts of the past into the realm of regret. We learn what we learn when we learn it, and we get it into our bodies when it happens. Sometimes the Universe makes those turning points obvious, sometimes it takes us awhile to get there. Better late than never.

The point is to get it into our systems now; our desires deserve an imagination that will allow intuition, integrity, knowledge, and humility to go after what we want guilt free—free from the echoes of past that are no longer suited for your real ambitions.

What do you think? Has fear literally cost you money, or time, or something else important? Even for those who have found some level of financial success, do you ever still hear negative whispers from that old money blueprint? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

For Your Freedom,

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