Your Success Mechanism
by John Botscharow
No one can make you successful. No one has to. You are preprogrammed to be successful.
Yes, you read that right. We do not need to learn to succeed. But some of us need to unlearn failure. That is what traditional sales training does not teach nor can they teach it.
No one can teach us to unlearn failure except we ourselves.
You see, how we fail and how we learned to fail is unique to each of us. Our failures are our own. We created them out of the feedback we received in the past. By feedback I mean the tings that happened to you, the things that were said to you, the things that were said about you, and so on.
For instance, I'm not very athletically inclined and tend to be a bit of a klutz most of the time. Now, I always thought that was the way I was born. But I'm not so sure any more.
The reason I've gotten uncertain is partly due to my five-year-old son, Michael.Everybody says he is the spittin'' image of me as a kid. When you compare pictures of us at the same age, it sure seems so.
Mikey is a very athletic little boy who is a bit of a daredevil. He is also very good at doing things with his hands, which I'm not, unless you count typing on a keyboard. He drives nails better than I do.
I got to thinking about all this and started searching my memories of my childhood. And I remember I used to love to play with blocks and TinkeyToys and Lincoln logs and Erector sets, just like Mikey does with his Legos and his various HotWheels play sets.
Also Mikey is terrific at putting puzzles together. He's not quite five - next month - but he will sit down at the dining room table and put together a one hundred piece puzzle all by himself. He does it the same way I do. He can conceptualize what the missing piece looks like and then pick it out of the pile. How do I know this? I asked him/
I do the same thing. One of the most favorite thing for me and Mikey to do together is puzzles. I love doing puzzles.
So why did I turn out to be such a klutz?
Because of the feedback I got as a child. Now, I'm not trying to lay guilt or blame on anyone. I've learned that does no good. Besides, my parents did the best they knew how, just like yours did. And just like everybody's parents, even Mikey's, they made mistakes.
For reasons unknown to me, my parents were very reluctant to let me do anything athletic. The only really strenuous athletics I ever did was fighting with my younger brother. I was not allowed to play football with the other kinds or any of the other rough games that kinds play.
I finally, with much screaming and yelling and some crying, convinced my mother, against my father's wishes, to sign an athletic permission slip for me to try out for basketball when I was in ninth grade - my freshman year in high school.
That previous summer I had grown a good four or five inches and not put on a pound. Those were he days:-). I went from being a pudgy kid to being a gangly one.
Anyway, I went to the tryouts and managed to hold my own until the very end. There was one more person to be cut and so the coach had us run three-man fast breaks. Well, I tripped over my own feet just as I was going toward the basket to score and fell flat on my face.
Guess who was the last person cut? Yep, yours truly. The coach, who was our guidance counselor later, told me that he really was prepared to keep on the team until that last trip. Even then he almost didn't do it.
Now, I have rationalized that trip for the last nearly forty years as being the result of my growth spurt. But, I've since learned, although it's taken me until recently for this to register at a personal level, that the human body AUTOMATICALLY adjusts for changes like that. We do not LEARN coordination. We have it unless we tell ourselves otherwise.
Guess I told myself otherwise.
More evidence to support that conclusion. The following year my parents allowed me to try out for the new soccer team. Being European, they approved of soccer and felt that I would not be participating in some American rough and tumble sport. Right!
The coach of the soccer team was the same teacher who coached freshman basketball the year before. Boy, talk about coincidences. However, I had gotten to know him very well over the past year and was now quite comfortable out there.
Also, with one or two exceptions, no one trying out for the team had any experience playing soccer of any kind. We were all on the same level of experience and expertise.
Both that and knowing the coach as a friend allowed me to relax and just go out and play for the fun of it. Guess what? I was GOOD at it. I made the team as the starting left wing. We had a fun and successful season as an intramural team.
The following year the school board approved soccer as a varsity sport. I was guaranteed a spot on the varsity. During one of our early games, I hurt my ankle and could not run very much, so the coach moved me to goalie because our goalie quit the team.
I spent rest of the season as the starting goalie. We went on to win the conference championship our first year as a varsity team. i got a letter and a trophy. I also was named All-Conference second team goalie. Not bad for a kid who thought of himself most of the time as a klutz.
Why did I succeed at soccer when I failed at basketball. Did I give myself lots of good motivational pep talks? No! Did I do lots of singing school fight songs and dancing around my desk like they made me do in a sales training once? No! Did I read lots of self-help books? No! Did I try to WILL myself to succeed? ABSOLUTELY NOT!
What I did was relax and have fun. I let my Success Mechanism take over.
That is why some people succeed and others don't. Not because they do anything consciously. But because they let their "subconscious" take over.
Stop TRYING to succeed. Relax and have fun. Let your Success Mechanism do the work
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John Botscharow is the owner of 3R Marketing.REAL HELP FROM REAL MARKETERS Unconventional Tactics For Conventional Profits! We PREACH, TEACH and PRACTICE Guerrilla Marketing. http://www.3r-marketing.com
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