Do You Suffer from Protection Fever?

Eileen Silva © 2006
email: ensilva@aol.com
web: http://www.easilymakingmoney.com/

Do you try to “protect” your contacts from exposure to other companies’ distributors, products, and opportunities? I know many industry leaders and MLM company owners who have terminal cases of this “Protection Fever.” They hover over their distributors like a mother bird trying to shelter them from any new thinking or outside influence, so that they won’t fly off to another branch or business pathway.

But, let’s think about training birds for a moment . . . You train birds not to fly off, while helping them gain confidence and overcome fears, much like you work with your new distributors. I learned this by training countless, seemingly unmanageable, birds. When beginning a training regimen with a new bird, instead of hiding the boxes of bird seed, covering up the water faucet, and eliminating the bird’s awareness of his environment, I have always had the greatest success by doing just the opposite. My birds have always traveled on foot because they chose to. They knew about all their options, and believe me – the lifestyle I promoted became their lifestyle of choice.

I don’t mean to compare your company’s opportunity to birdseed or your distributors to parakeets . . . but the parallels are obvious. You’ve gotta learn to love our business. My birds have always loved their lifestyle. From the moment they woke up each morning until they closed their excited little beady eyes, they set their standards, designed their lifestyles. They had every toy worth having and every crumb their little hearts desired. Once they learned how to be a bird in my home, they adapted instantly to the good life and never looked back.

Distributors are a lot like trained parakeets. The more you train them to “perform” on cue and “chirp” for the big payout, the more they perform and chirp for you. Period! And the better they seem to like it.

So --- let me ask you --- does it really make sense to try to censor their reading material and their MLM contacts? What does that posture really say about you and the confidence you have in your opportunity and your leadership? I write to entertain you while training, promoting new thinking, offering training tips or personal development directions and ways to evaluate your business and/or your company. I would hate to think that you, who I hope are the leaders of your company, hoard all the great material for your own use exclusively.

Why not, instead, encourage them to explore new ideas and people, with the expectation that your leadership can hold them and help them apply the lessons they can learn from these new and exciting experiences?

I encourage you to stop trying to think for your downline. It really tends to be a momentum killer anyway. When you let go of that control — which is more about you than about them —you’ll undoubtedly have a more dynamic and cohesively bonded organization. And as an added bonus, you’ll also be a great bird trainer.