Hey, Tasha here with Emerge Sales Training, and today I’m gonna share with you 4 Hacks to Being Great At Working For Yourself.  We’re a sales and leadership training company for network marketers who are good people and want to help others. We give hope and skills at all levels.  And one of the biggest challenges that we have is this whole “being your own boss” thing. It’s such an amazing opportunity, yet it is also a curse, right?  

 

So I am a total behavioral psychologist nerd.  I’m obsessed with it, and one of my favorite authors, Adam Grant, just started a new podcast, called Work Life, and it’s all about how to make work not suck.  That is his tagline, not mine. So I just listened to an episode on working for yourself, and I wanted to share with you the four hacks that were presented in this particular podcast episode.  I want to show you how they can apply to network marketing, and how I see these things show up in our students and our clients.

 

Working for yourself is awesome.  It’s also not awesome. We all love to be our own boss, but if we’re gonna be honest most of the time, we’re crappy employees.  So if you were a crappy employee in your non-working-for-yourself job, it’s likely you’re gonna be a crappy employee in your own business, and the thing is we wear both hats.  We wear the hat of the boss, and we wear the hat of the employee as well. And so the boss sets the tone, sets the direction, makes the schedule, sets the goals. And we take that hat off and we kind of walk over to the other side and we’re like, “All right, sucker, execute!”  And sometimes as bosses we’re great, and as employees we’re not so great.

 

So how do you do this, because the only accountability you have is your paycheck.  In most businesses, even in network marketing, the sales and income you’re looking at all happened based on work 60 to 90 days ago, right?  So whatever sales Emerge makes this week is based on relationships we built 60-90 days ago, seeds we planted 60-90 days ago, motivation we had, and hard work we put in 60-90 days ago.  And so today, as you’re reading this, I am planting the seeds for our success in 60-90 days. And so the problem is that the paycheck or the sales isn’t timely enough feedback.

 

Like when we’re normally in a corporate-type setting with a boss, our boss gives us immediate instant feedback so we can correct.  Well, the feedback takes such a long time, and by then it’s like “Ohhhh,” right? We get so bummed. But there are some psychological hacks that you can do, and I have a feeling, my friends, you’re gonna resist most of these.  Because most of the hacks I’m gonna tell you are things that you saw when you worked for someone else. Because the structures that are in place in corporations and such are there to establish maximum human productivity, and so these things matter, whether you are working for someone else or not.  

 

I feel like in network marketing there’s this myth, or there’s this ideal that if I’m successful it means I do whatever I want whenever I want to do it, and I don’t think that’s true, right?  Just a couple days ago I met with a client who’s traveling around the world with her family, and I messaged her at our coaching time. I was like “Alright, sister, we’re meeting right now.” No matter where she is in the world, we have our time on Thursdays at 11 Pacific, and we still have to do the stuff and we have to have certain routines.

 

So here are the four hacks  

 

Hack #1:  Place.  

Where do you work?  For me, I have this office that you see me always recording in.  This is where I work. I don’t come in here unless I am maybe reading.  I’ll read on the couch, I won’t read at my desk. When I sit down here, this is when the green light turns on.  This is when I work. If I’m writing content, though, I’ll probably take it to the couch. I end up way more creative, and I’m not distracted by the Facebook world, or feeling like I should be recording something.  And so where do you work?

 

What do you wear?   For me, I have this coach/trainer persona, that’s where I feel comfortable.  So I wear my sweatshirt, I wear my graphic tee. I wear what’s comfortable because that’s where I feel the most comfortable and authentic.  But I think that’s different for other people. They really are like, “I need to dress up because that makes me feel like I’m at work.” And so create that environment in which you feel like you’re at work.  Whatever brings you maximum productivity.

 

Hack #2:  Habits around a regular schedule.  

What’s so interesting about this one is, again, we don’t want to have a regular schedule, because we work for ourselves.  We should be able to do everything whenever we want. Well, there’s a lot of research on authors around this, and authors have to write this huge amount of output, they don’t have anyone over them, the publisher’s like, “All right, see you in a year, you better come up with something good.”  And they typically will pay authors an advance for that time that they’re working, so they really need to deliver. All the research around authors shows they just sit down and type, inspired or not. They just write.

 

I can’t remember the quote, but it’s about inspiration.  “I only write when I’m inspired, and it’s a good thing I’m inspired every day at 8 o’clock.”  Another author said, “I need to think about writing like a bricklayer. I just need to lay a certain amount of bricks every single day.”  Business is like art. It is creating something out of nothing.

 

That’s the same thing for any art, right?  If I’m gonna make videos, I usually make at least three a week, including my coaching.  Not all of them go viral, not all of them get huge responses, but gosh, maybe one out of 10 hits?  That’s how art works. That’s how writing works, that’s how creation works, and that’s how business works.  It is creating something from nothing, right?

 

So not every single one of your customers is going to buy.  Not every single one of your leaders is going to pan out. It’s like art, but we have to show up every day, create routines around that, and continue to lay bricks until, I guess, the castle is built.

 

Hack #3: Ongoing interaction.  

When we work alone, when we work for ourselves, it can get really lonely, and it’s really important to have a community around you.  I have seen great friendships form within the Emerge community, people that were not on different networking teams that became friends in courses, and became each other’s support systems.  When I’m going through a day I usually will call someone on my team and have that interaction. Like, “Oh yeah, this is our purpose,” which I’ll get to in a minute, and get back on it. But if I go a whole day without talking to anyone, my motivation starts to wane. Because in a traditional work setting, we have built-in community, right?  We go to the water cooler, we chat with someone over the cube, we go to lunch with someone. Now, when we work at home, that’s not necessarily the case, and so we have to be intentional about creating communities, because if we start to slip into boredom or loneliness, that is not a good place to create and get success.

 

Hack #4:  Purpose.  

You always have to remember why you are doing this.  There’s a great story about when a NASA janitor was interviewed, I think it was one of the presidents that asked him, “What do you do here?” and he says, “Well, I’m helping get man on the moon.”  He’s a janitor, and that is the right attitude. For me, what I do is I help people take care of their families and have more joy in their business and in their work life. Whether that’s someone on my team, or whether that is one of our students, or clients, that’s what I do, that’s the purpose.

 

When Charlie was working at the lab, he’s a guy on the microscope, looking at the cells, right?  But that’s not the way he looked at it. He didn’t say “I look at a scope all day.” He said, “I help people get healed of cancer.”  And that was something that motivated him to go to work every single day. We have to remember what our purpose is.

 

And so, here, let me just go ahead and give you a recap on the four hacks.  

 

Hack #1:  Your place-where do you work?

Hack #2:  Routines

Hack #3:  Ongoing interaction

Hack #4:  Purpose

 

There is actually a fifth hack that I thought was really, really cool.  Daniel Pink (also one of my favorite authors) said, “When you’re feeling in a rut, take a step back.  It’s called distancing, and say, ‘Gosh, what would I tell a friend who is in the same situation?’”

 

And so if you’re feeling like, “Uh, how do I get to work?” here’s the question:  What’s one small thing that you could do to make a difference in your business? And get some momentum around that one small thing you could do,

 

If your focus for that particular week or month is making sales, what’s one thing that will move that forward?  If it’s recruiting, if it’s training, if it’s coaching, or if it’s all of them? What’s one specific thing that will help you to move forward toward your goal?  Sometimes we get really overwhelmed by all the things ever, and we just need to know we can’t do five things at the same time. So we just need to start with one.  One thing that is gonna help us to move forward in our business. And if we do that, and then we do another, and then we do another, you can start to see flexibility all over the place if you are doing the stuff.  So yes, learning is important, professional development is important. Reading this blog is important, because it’ll help you to get batter in your craft. But none of that matters if you don’t ask yourself the question first.  You could set up your place, you could create a routine, you could do ongoing interaction, you could think about your purpose, but none of that matters until you answer this fundamental question: What am I doing right now to move my business forward?

 

Thanks for reading today’s post.  I hope this was helpful for you. If you want to follow us, you can go to www.Facebook.com/emergesalestraining.  If you want to check out one of our free trainings, you can also go to emergesalestraining.com/freetraining, or emergesalestraining.com/courses to check out our courses to help you to move forward in your business.

 

Thanks and have a great day!