A while back I was having a conversation with a business associate who, by most people's standards, is very successful financially. We're talking about a guy who is definitely one of the top 2% of earners, the kind of money that most people only dream of. During this particular chat we started talking about work in general and I made the offhand comment, "Hey, it's tough to make a living." My associate replied, "Jeff, it's not hard at all to make a living, but it takes work to get rich." I thought about it for a moment and realized that he had said something profound. It takes work.

In my business I get to meet a lot of people on an almost daily basis. Salespeople, sales managers, vice presidents of sales, presidents and CEOs. Often I'm asked, usually by salespeople and their direct managers, how they can make more money. My answer is, "It takes work." You see, I've discovered something interesting over the last few years. Almost everyone wants to be rich but very few are willing to pay the price. Whether you want to be rich or just make more money than you do now, IT TAKES WORK!

IT TAKES WORK to get up in the morning and adjust your attitude. Most of us wake up in a fog, stumble into the bathroom to take care of our morning business and then stumble down the hall to the kitchen where we brew up our first cup of coffee of the day. While downing that brew we think about how we'd rather be sleeping late, taking the day off, relaxing and enjoying life and generally start to dread the day ahead. Instead, this is time I suggest that would be better spent consciously creating the coming day, but IT TAKES WORK. Conscious creation of the coming day is exactly what it sounds like: creating your day. Instead of drowning in the muck of what's ahead you think about how thankful you are to be alive. How wonderfully the day is going to go. How happy you're going to be. How you're going to be a positive influence on others and how they're going to respond to you positively. How the things you think about and the actions you take are all going to work out beautifully. You visualize the sales calls you're going to go on and see the prospect reaching across their desk, smiling, to shake your hand as they say, "Yes, I want to do business with you." Conscious creation works, but IT TAKES WORK.

For salespeople, and I say this often, among the most important things you can do each do in order to insure your success is making sure you've got a pipeline filled with prospects. For most of us this means you need to prospect every day but, for most of us, this is a dreaded activity. It's also the one thing that solves almost every sales problem. Not enough in the pipeline? Prospect more. Not enough money coming in? Prospect more. Not closing enough business? Prospect more. Customers negotiating you down to nearly unprofitable levels? Prospect more. (so that you can negotiate from a position of strength - see last month's newsletter for more on this subject) For nearly half the questions I'm asked my answer is prospect more, but IT TAKES WORK.

As a sales trainer I work with salespeople and their managers sharing techniques and processes that can help them be more successful. I'm often asked, before being hired, about R.O.I. My answer, to the chief sales guru at the prospect company I'm talking with is always the same, "I can't guarantee any return on investment. I wish I could but I don't know what your sales managers and salespeople are going to do with the information I share with them once I leave. I'll do everything in my power to give them the tools they need to get more appointments and close more business than ever before but they have to implement those tools and IT TAKES WORK." IT TAKES WORK to actually pick up the phone and make cold calls. IT TAKES WORK to implement new techniques. IT TAKES WORK to try new things as opposed to doing what you always do. IT TAKES WORK.

How many of us have attended a seminar, read a book or a newsletter listened to a CD and learned something new that sounded like a good idea but never put it to use? (if you're not raising your hand right now you're a liar!) Most people I know have invested in a tape or CD series to improve or change something in their lives but they never listen to them. Is it because they don't want to? Is it because they are not interested in improvement? Did they just want to throw some money out the window? Probably not. I recently invested over $200 in a program designed to help you read substantially faster than normal. (the average person reads about 300-500 words per minute - this program claims to be able to get you to read as much as 25,000 words per minute!) It's been sitting on the floor near my desk for over a month. Because I don't want to read substantially faster? Because I don't think being able to read more books and newspapers would help me be more successful? Because I like reading slowly? No. The reason I haven't gotten past the first lesson is IT TAKES WORK.

I could go on and on with examples that would cause you to say, "Yeah, I've done that too." Want your relationship with your spouse and children to be better? IT TAKES WORK. Want your dog to be well trained? IT TAKES WORK. Want to have a better body? IT TAKES WORK. Want to have more money, more security, more success, more happiness, more of anything? IT TAKES WORK.

Here's my suggestion: Sometime this weekend take 30 minutes for yourself. Grab a piece of paper and write down all the things you're committed to. If you have a list of goals that you wrote out at the end of last year, or the beginning of this one, that would be a good thing to have for this exercise too. Take a look at your goals and see how far you've advanced toward reaching them. Acknowledge yourself for the things you've accomplished and the progress you've made. Make a list of the things you still need to do in order to reach the rest of your goals. Write down the actions you need to take, the people you need to contact, the books you need to read or anything else you need to do in order to make your life into what you want it to be. Now write down your commitments to those actions. Make promises to yourself. And then, KEEP THOSE PROMISES.

You can create the life you want, the health you desire, the relationships you dream of and the success that's avoided you most of your life (as if success didn't want to hang out with you) but IT TAKES WORK!

Make It Happen,

Jeff