Financial Freedom is a Process Not a Secret Sauce

DAhh George you have hit a nerve with your topic this month! What are “The Secrets Of Financial Freedom” indeed! The American dream. A good dream to pursue. However, for many it feels like the impossible dream. Yet, it need not feel impossible nor be impossible. What is the big secret to building financial wealth? There is no secret. There is no magic to financial freedom. It takes exactly what

anything else you build takes. Awareness, action, courage and a simple plan. Sorry if I’ve disappointed you. But I believe in bottom line basics as much as I believe in anything.

How Does One Make Financial Freedom Happen In Network Marketing?

Over the years of working my own businesses, traditional as well as network marketing, I’ve learned (the hard way sometimes) that being aware and working sound basic principles and to keep swinging is the key to success of any kind. www.TheNetworkMarketingMagazine.com 1

How much money you make is only one factor in obtaining financial freedom. I’ve seen people make what we like to refer to in network marketing as ‘gangster money.’ Yet at the end of the day, they are broke. They live worrying about how they are going to pay for everything. And in some cases, they’ve lost what they did have and are now living hand-to- mouth.

I’ve watched others in network marketing make good money, not gangster money, but good money and attain full financial freedom. I’m not talking about just a good financial life. I’m talking about a great financial life. If they want to travel they do, first class. If they want something, they have it.

How does someone make way less than someone else, spend the same kind of money, but have financial freedom at the end of the day rather than financial chaos?

Simple really. Being financially free is not just about how much money you make. It is also, not necessarily, about how much money you save. Oh they are factors, but not all the ingredients.

Here are five basics of financial freedom:

• Being aware of how much money you want to make. 2. Being aware of how you want to spend your money. 3. Being aware of how you intend to make it. 4. Being aware of how much money you DO make. 5. Keep swinging

Awareness is a big factor in making any business (or anything at all) successful. I read somewhere years ago that ‘awareness is curative.’ In other words, as soon as you are aware of something you are on your way to ‘curing the problem.’ And as for ‘keep swinging,’ well nothing happens without action.

Being Aware Of How Much Money You Want To Make.

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How many times have you gone on vacation and had no idea in mind of where you were going or what you were going to do? How many times have you gone grocery shopping and had no idea of what you needed to buy? How many times have you walked into the kitchen to make dinner and had no idea what you were going to fix?

Regardless of how you answered the above questions, I’ll bet that if you knew where you were going on vacation and did some planning, your vacation was probably more enjoyable. If you went into the market with some idea (maybe a list) of what you needed you typically got home with everything you wanted. Once you decided what you were going to make for dinner, lots of the angst was gone and you could move forward to get it done.

Why was it easier? You were aware of what you were going to do. You were no longer in the dark. You had a goal. You had a direction. You were aware of your primary intention. Money responds exactly the same way.

Being aware of your primary intention is critical to any endeavor. If you play tennis, what is the primary intention? To return the ball over the net to the exact spot you want it to go. Everything you do in your tennis game is geared toward helping you do just that and to get better and better at it.

The bottom line primary intention of a business is to make money. Sometimes I think people in network marketing are a little embarrassed about that. There is nothing to be embarrassed about. The primary purpose of any business is to make money.

A great question to ask yourself (and your new recruits when they start their business) is, “How much money do I want to make?” You need that answer in order to have direction. Without a stated (aware) financial goal, chances are you’ll flounder. Your business must have a goal for its primary intention – to make money.

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Don’t let self doubt stop you from asking and answering that question. It is only a goal, a direction. It isn’t a life and death issue. Once you are aware of your target it simply becomes a measurement of your process. Your process is what becomes important once the target is set. The next four items are all about process.

Being Aware Of How You Want To Spend Your Money Although financial freedom is something you hear people in network marketing talk about, it seldom means the same thing to any two individuals. Financial freedom has no meaning to any of us until we break it down into the personal. That is, until you are fully aware of what financial freedom personally means to you they are just words. Ask yourself, if you were financially free, how would it change your life?

What would be the first thing that would be different? Would you quit your job? Would your partner quit their job? Hmmmm, how would that change things? These kinds of questions are critical to knowing why you want the money. It is that awareness thing again.

I don’t know what your currency looks like, but in the United States it is green pieces of paper with dead men’s pictures on it. Nobody works for that. Nobody. We have no emotional connection to that currency. If we were paid for our labor in puka beads we wouldn’t care about those green pieces of paper. We only care about the paper because of what it can purchase. It is the purchases that motivate us to work for the paper. Not the paper.

Why are we motivated by the purchases? We are connected to them emotionally. The things we buy make our lives better. They make us feel good. Without that emotional connection we are most likely not going to work for anything. We are emotional beings (regardless of how left brained you think you are) and we respond and react to things based upon our emotions.

If you want to make a million dollars, you need to know what you are going to use the money for. Because when the going is tough, and it will be tough occasionally this is the real www.TheNetworkMarketingMagazine.com 4 world, you need to have a good strong emotional attachment as to why you want those ‘puka beads.’

Being Aware Of How You Intend To Make It Systems. I could close right here and go to the next section because it is the final word. Systems.

If you want your business to operate in a financially vibrant way, you must systematically run it. What does that mean? You start a new recruit (all of them) the same way. You hostess coach all your hostesses the same way. You have a sound prospecting system in place that may include the following: buying leads, bumps, samples, giving to the community (you give first then get) leads groups (e.g. women network groups, BNI or chamber of commerce etc) social media. This just scratches the surface. But you get the picture. You have methods (systems) in place and you use them regularly.

Your business needs to be systems driven. If you have systems that drive your business, you have laid the foundation for duplication and a financially thriving business. Everyone who joins your business can rely on your system not their personality to drive their business. Personalities are not duplicable but systems are.

Too many people start businesses without being intentional about how they are going to run them. So it runs them... right into the ground. If you are aware of how you intend to run your business, and run it systematically it will thrive and so will you. www.TheNetworkMarketingMagazine.com 5

Use a system and keep asking yourself how things are working. Problems will become obvious long before they are terminal. You will have plenty of time to make adjustments. You will see what works and be able to enhance those tools and continue to make things run even more smoothly. Financial freedom comes from being aware and intentional about running your business.

For those of you who are reading this and saying, “But I don’t know what to do.” Spend time paying attention to your business. When we don’t know what to do next we can often solve the issue by simply spending time with it. Pay attention. Ask yourself what isn’t working. And spend some time thinking and writing about it. Ask yourself what you might do to correct or improve what you are doing. Go for help. Ask upline or a successful cross line. Come check us out at http://www.savvysponsoring.com/ and see what kind of tools we have to offer. But take action and pay attention. You’ll be amazed how often that solves the problem.

Too many times we do nothing because we are afraid of making a mistake. If you are not making mistakes you are not getting better. It means you are doing only what you are comfortable doing. Not a good idea.

If you want to be outrageously successful, then you must make errors. You must make mistakes. Or you will stay right where you are. The biggest mistake you make is staying inside of your comfort zone.

Being Aware Of How Much Money You Do Make If I asked you what you grossed last month could you tell me? How about if I asked you how that related to the same month last year? Could you tell me if you made more or less money? Do you know if you grossed more this month than last?

www.TheNetworkMarketingMagazine.com 6 If you say (or think), “I don’t like math so I don’t keep track of my money” know this: You will never have financial freedom. Oh you might make lots of money (although I doubt it). But you won’t keep it.

Why, because you are not aware, you are not paying attention. When you don’t pay attention to something it doesn’t thrive. Nothing does. Think about this for a minute. What happens to relationships if you don’t pay attention to them? They go stale. What happens to children if you don’t pay attention to them? They go awry. What happens to a garden if you don’t pay attention to it? It turns to chaos full of weeds.

What happens to money if you don’t pay attention to it? Exactly the same thing, it goes awry. It doesn’t thrive. You don’t have to be a ‘numbers person’ to pay attention to the money you make. We can all do simple addition and subtraction. That’s all we talking about here. This is not black magic, although how some people approach the money their business makes might make you think otherwise.

Your business is a story. It is a story of successes, failures, frustrations and breakthroughs. Money is a big piece of that story. Being aware of the story your business is telling you is a major step in the direction of “financial freedom.”

How do you listen to your business’s story? Pay attention to how much money your business is generating. Compare this month’s income to last month’s. Compare the current month’s numbers to the same month a

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year earlier. What are the numbers saying? Are they going up? Down? By how much?

Hiding from what you think might be “bad news” doesn’t make it go away. It becomes a ball and chain on your ankle that you drag around with you. You may not be fully aware of the real story but your reluctance to look at what your business is telling you is a real yoke around your neck. The good news is you can rid yourself of that yoke right now.

Simply start paying attention to the financial story your business is telling you. When you turn the light on in the closet the boogy man disappears. Shed some light on those numbers. You will be surprised at what you find. And it will lead to better things. Awareness is curative.

Here is a “financial freedom” game I learned to play years ago. Fill in the blanks below. What is Not Enough Money for you? What is Barely Enough money? What is Just Enough money?

What is More Than Enough? How does that change things for you?

What does Much More than enough look like? Is that your financial freedom? How does that feel? What does your life look like?

Take some time with this and really ask yourself these questions.

Not Enough Barely Just Enough More than Much More

Enough Enough than Enough

$ $ $ $ $ Financial Freedom Means The Courage To Fail

If you are not making mistakes and dealing with mishap, you are not growing and building your business. You are working in your comfort zone. No personal or business growth there. www.TheNetworkMarketingMagazine.com 8

Most of us know Babe Ruth for his home runs. Even I grew up with the story of the great home run hitter Babe Ruth and I’ve been to only a hand full of baseball games in my life! But I know this story. And it’s a great story about a man who didn’t care how many times he failed. He didn’t care how many times someone told him “no.” He just cared about swinging the bat. This is what I mean.

Babe Ruth stood at home plate 4100 times. He was told “no” 2,056 times. He was denied the opportunity to swing his bat. The pitcher walked him 2056 times! Out of those 4100 times at bat he swung hard 1330 times and struck out. He stood at home plate 1330 times and failed. And he struck out in front of huge crowds. But he kept swinging.

What do we remember Babe Ruth for? Not for his strike outs. We remember him for the 714 times he stood at home plate and swung... and hit a home run.

Babe Ruth is as human as the rest of us. I’d bet there was lots of adrenalin surging in his body when he was about to swing. But swing he did. He found his courage and swung. We are all afraid occasionally. There is no dishonor in fear. It is a human condition. The goal is to find our courage and swing.

Every shot is a missed shot if you don’t swing. You can’t connect unless you swing.

Having financial freedom means being aware. Having financial freedom means paying attention (listening) to the story your business is telling you. Having financial freedom means having the courage to keep swinging.

I hope you find this article of help. Please come visit us at http://www.savvysponsoring.com Register for our newsletter and receive our complementary Five Steps to Work Smart and Make More Money. If I can be of service, please give me a call.

Jillian Middleton http://www.savvysponsoring.com/ 781-599-0604

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Jillian Middleton is a Mentor Coach and Trainer, and author of the courses '5 Steps to Working Less and Making More in MLM'

As creator of the Savvy Sponsoring Strategies programs, Jillian trains network marketers and direct sales consultants the same strategies she used to build two 6-figure network marketing businesses in 5 years.

Get Your Free Report: The "5 Steps to Work Less and Make Money In Network Marketing" at www.SavvySponsoring.com If you would like to inquire about having Jillian speak at your next event, please send an email to speaking@savvysponsoring.com

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