Network Marketing Journey

After returning home to Minnesota - [again] - I went back to work for Wal-Mart. By the time the dust and emotions from all of these experiences settled I was pretty numb, I lost all self awareness and as a result of those losses, my dreams dissipated and were lost as well.

Ever noticed that time has a one-two punch? When you are in the moment time can seem like its passing by so slowly, and yet when you look back at 1 year, 5 years or a whole decade it all seems to have gone by so fast. Funny how that works isn’t it? Well, this is exactly how I felt and I drifted through the next 5 years of my life.

After so much time passing and having so much pain bottled up inside, festering, I would have a life altering conversation with a co-worker. He was telling me about a network marketing company, a nutritional company and he would go on to tell me about how I could sign up to be a distributor. He expressed sincere excitement about the opportunity and how it could be an amazing ride for both of us–little did he know how right he was.

In the beginning I had absolutely no intention of signing up. I wanted no part of it but a small group of people who did sign up was forming locally and one of those individuals wasn’t taking no for an answer. They wanted me on their team. After some prodding I agreed to sign up and looking back on it, I was essentially bullied into it but to be honest I wouldn’t change a thing because I found myself on a path of renewal.

After a few months, walls were already beginning to pop up. Working with the group and listening to conference calls just wasn’t doing it for me. I didn’t believe I could make it work and I constantly grappled with continuing or quitting. The inner demons talked pretty loud at this point and I just couldn’t figure out how I could make it work. Being an introvert made social interaction impossible (or so I believed at the time) and if I can’t bring myself to talk to people about my new business … how could I hope to have any success? Seems like a logical conclusion but I kept pushing forward.

The first few months were hard but after listening to a network marketing instructor by the name of Dani Johnson, I committed to the decision to own my life and never to give up.

Tom Long, my associate and dear friend talked me through a lot of it, held my hand if you will (and I’m forever grateful to him for it). During one of our conversations he would comment about my passion for writing and suggested blogging as a way to get the word out about my business. Little did I know he had other motives for the suggestion. I’ve never gotten him to admit it, but I think he made the suggestion knowing it would do my heart and my mind a lot of good–in the form of expression.

If this is the case, he was right.

Today I will not be going into the full story of the months which followed, and the blessings I have received but you can read an early version of the story at Talking Story.

Blogging opened me up to the world and to so many possibilites. This was the birth of the original home of Live Your Best Life on Typepad. Writing this blog and participating in the varies forums and blog carnivals I was invited to gave my thoughts, ideas and beliefs a voice. When Bob Proctor suggest writing down your goals, dreams and things you want to see in your life he does so because writing them down makes them real.

Live Your Best Life gave my thoughts substance and as I explored myself and themes of personal growth, I wrote about them. By the way, I can’t recommend this activity highly enough and I would like to add one more detail. Sit down with a pen and paper to write it all down, write it as if the things you want to see in your life have already happened but don’t end it there.

Keep this paper with you and read it whenever you feel a negative creeping in and for goodness sake, keep writing! Each time you feel new desires and ideas bubbling up write them down, commit them to paper and write out each and every detail. If you are like me, your hand will refuse to stop writing because it is to much fun.

Your thoughts are your power.

Over the last year and a half (almost 2 years now) I have discovered many things and each day continues to bring new discoveries. My dreams have returned to me and because I committed to creating change in my life I am seeing the first of those desires coming true.

A passion for personal growth, self realization and helping others has surfaced and this is why I share these things along with network marketing and business building. I’m interested in success but the real reward is fostering growth and seeing others succeed and grow. In fact, this is one of the reasons I like Network Marketing so much. The entire network marketing model is built on helping others become successful.

My experience has taught me that without the right mindset things like the lottery mentality, entitlement mentality, victim mentality, self doubt and fear can cripple even the best of entrepreneurs. I aim to equip people with the knowledge and the tools to defeat such things and create their own successes.

I suffered a lot of ups and downs in my first year but eventually Tom would be the catalyst for more change in my life. He introduced me to Matthew Jamieson, a SEO specialist in the network marketing industry.

Matt and I developed a friendship and he shared his SEO techniques with me. I took my new found direction, confidence, and internet marketing skills and ran with it full steam ahead. In as little as a couple days I was popping up everywhere in Google (To this day my team reports comments from prospects saying they have seen me and my websites in several different places. This immediately commanded a sense of authority.) and in a couple weeks I was on the first page for selected keywords.

In the following months Matt would begin telling my story on his training calls, lifting me up as an example and explaining that I taught him a thing or two as well. While this touched me and made me realize I’d finally found my place, my home and my passions and nothing would make me smile or laugh harder than to hearing Tom and Matt giving me a hard time saying things like, “We’ve created a monster!”

Currently I continue to build a business as a network marketer, and grow as an internet marketer and entrepreneur. I’ve defeated many of the fears and doubts I once had as an Introvert and have embraced it instead of being ashamed of it. Through all of this I’ve developed a sense of who I am and a business which continues to grow. My experiences have had such a profound affect on me and the articles on this blog are a direct result of the desire to share them in the hope of helping someone else find their way.

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