By Noah St. John, Ph.D.
"If you ask me something I don't know, I 'm not going to answer."
— Yogi Berra
Last time, I revealed the 5 A's of your People System. They are:
1. Acknowledge
2. Ask
3. Accept
4. Accountability
5. Afform
Let's look at the second A - Ask.
Imagine that you and I are in a big room with many other Secret Code students and Afformers from around the world, gathered together to study these principles. (Of course, this is exactly what happens in our seminars, so it's not hard to imagine!)
Would you find it difficult to ask the people in this room for support? Would you feel embarrassed, shy, or hesitant to ask for the support you need?
When I ask my seminar audiences if they find it hard to ask for the support they need, even from people they know, more than 70% say yes.
Why are we so afraid to ask? It all comes down to...
A Four-Letter Word Starting with F
That word is, of course, FEAR. (What word were YOU thinking about?)
What causes the fear of asking? It’s really the fear of rejection.
It's the fear that the other person might say no; the fear that someone might laugh at us or make fun of us.
This fear may stem from when we were told, "Shut up, go away and don’t bother me." Maybe not in so many words, but we got the point.
Notice that very successful people do not have a problem asking. You've heard that the best salespeople keeping asking for the sale. Not that they are hounding people; they simply keep asking.
But some of my clients say, "I don't want to be rude, I don't want to bother people." And you're right: you shouldn't be rude or bother people.
But what if you're presenting an opportunity that would truly benefit that other person? If you're adding Value to others, don't you owe it to them, and to yourself, to at least ASK if they’re interested?
A friend who'd taken my seminars told me that the company she worked for really needed my help. She told me who to call at the company's headquarters.
But when I told this person what my friend had said, she replied, "No thanks. We're all set." Click.
That was weird, I thought. Maybe I caught her on a bad day.
So I called back a month later just to check in. "No thanks." Same response.
I actually did this a couple more times until I got a clue. I called my friend back and asked, "Are you sure I'm talking with the right person?"
She gave me another name, this time a Vice President. I dialed, fully prepared to get shot down again.
The VP asked me what I did. I said, I show people how to annihilate their head trash. She asked me how my System worked. I told her about the results people were getting in a matter of weeks, even days.
She said, "That sounds good. I'll have someone call you back." Yeah, right, I thought.
The very next day, I got into work and there was this message on the phone: "Noah, this is ____. I just spoke with our VP and we'd like you to speak on a cruise to Mexico for 2,000 of our international salespeople. We'll fly you first class to Los Angeles and you'll only have to speak for a couple of hours. You can relax for the rest of the 4-day cruise.
"Oh, and we're putting you in one of the master cabins on the ship and pay for everything."
All righty then.
My point: if I had stopped at the first "no", I wouldn't have flown first class and stayed in a master cabin on a cruise ship to Mexico, and get paid to do what I love.
However, I DIDN'T keep asking the wrong person when that wasn’t getting the result I wanted!
Many teachers talk about important it is to be persistent. But the point they missed is that persistence is a behavior.
Behavior cannot be created at the level of behavior.
Therefore, in order to create the behavior of persistence, you must find your deeper Why-To. To gain the courage to Ask, you must understand the Value you bring to others.
Here is how we describe what we do at SuccessClinic.com:
"We teach people the System that annihilates head trash and removes the gaps between where they ARE and where they WANT to be."
Now, it's one thing to go around saying stuff like that, and quite another to prove it.
We have unassailable proof that our System works.
Not only do lots of famous people endorse our System, but regular people like you and me tell their personal stories of how they've doubled, tripled, even quintupled their incomes in less than 180 days because of our System.
You can do the exact same thing.
Exercise: Ask for What You Really Want
1. Write a list of WHAT you want.
2. Write WHO can give it to you.
3. Write the VALUE you can bring to those people.
4. CONTACT them and offer your Value to them.
5. Install a System to keep offering Value to others on a consistent daily basis.
If you don't currently have one, here's the one I use. It's awesome!
Keep presenting your Value to others, Ask if they're interested, and if they say no... go on to the next person.
When you keep presenting your Value to others, sooner or later, the right people will say yes.
Next time... the next A in your People System!