Orrin Woodward on LIFE & Leadership

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    Former Guinness World Record Holder for largest book signing ever, Orrin Woodward is a NY Times bestselling author of And Justice For All along with RESOLVED & coauthor of LeaderShift and Launching a Leadership Revolution. His books have sold over one million copies in the financial, leadership and liberty fields. RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions For LIFE made the Top 100 All-Time Best Leadership Books and the 13 Resolutions are the framework for the top selling Mental Fitness Challenge personal development program.

    Orrin made the Top 20 Inc. Magazine Leadership list & has co-founded two multi-million dollar leadership companies. Currently, he serves as the Chairman of the Board of the LIFE. He has a B.S. degree from GMI-EMI (now Kettering University) in manufacturing systems engineering. He holds four U.S. patents, and won an exclusive National Technical Benchmarking Award.

    This blog is an Alltop selection and ranked in HR's Top 100 Blogs for Management & Leadership.

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A Network Marketer’s Creed – III

Posted by Orrin Woodward on August 8, 2008

The leaders in the Networking field have three key roles that they play in helping their people win with the right company. 

1.  Maintain the bar high on personal excellence through tough love and high expectations.

2.  Accept, Approve, and Appreciate their teams by encouraging and being a good finder in people’s lives.

3.  Provide proper training and educational methods to develop leaders for sustained growth. 

 

I covered the first point in my last article and this can be summarized in the following Networking Creed.

 

3. Networking leaders hold the bar high on their people’s potential by providing tough love and refusing to settle for anything less than the personal best from themselves and their team.

 

I have always understood NM Creed #3, but did not grow a huge community until I learned the next Network Marketing Creed.

 

4. People yearn for genuine Acceptance, Approval, and Appreciation – Sustained growth in the Networking field is only possible when a culture of encouragement is bred into the entire organization.

 

You will see many organizations that are good at speaking the truth, but they do not speak the truth in love.  This hurts people, damages relationships and ultimately fractures the communities before they reach their potential.  Other organizations never tell the truth and people are arrested at different levels of development because they are not getting the proper mentorship.  The secret to large communities is the ability to share the truth in a loving way because the leaders want what is best for the people.  All of us must confront the sticking points in our leadership so we can grow and change.  NM Creeds 3 and 4 must go together.  One without the other will limit the size of your team.  With that said, if I only could take one then I would take #4 hands down. 

 

I have seen more people quit the Network Community Building field due to hurt feelings ten times more than I have seen people quit due to lack of income.  People need encouragement and belief from their leaders in order to grow.  Encouragement for the soul is like oxygen for the body.  Without encouragement people will never live up to their potential.  I still appreciate a sincere encouraging word from people I respect and so do you.  Let me share a true story of the power of encouragement and example in a person’s life from the book The Amazing Law of Influence by King Duncan.

 

“Andor Foldes was one of the most gifted classical musicians of the twentieth-century.  A native of Budapest, Foldes was already a skilled pianist by age sixteen, but he was troubled due to conflict with his piano teacher.  At this critical juncture in Foldes’ life, a renowned pianist, Emil von Sauer, came to his city to perform.  Von Sauer had the unique heritage of being the last surviving pupil of Franz Liszt.

 

At von Sauer’s request, young Foldes played for him some of the most difficult works of Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann.  Afterward, von Sauer kissed Foldes on the forehead and told him his teacher Hans Liszt had kissed him on the forehead when he was a student.  Liszt was passing on a kiss he had received from Beethoven, who had been moved on one occasion by Liszt’s playing.  Von Sauer felt Foldes deserved the honor of preserving this heritage.”

 

Can you imagine the encouragement that Andor Foldes must have felt by receiving that kiss on the forehead just as Beethoven had previously given to Hans Liszt and passed onto Emil von Sauer to Andor?  Talk about a blessed heritage!  Andor went on to a highlight career in the classical music field simply by the encouragement of people he respected.  Isn’t is a scary thought to consider how many would be talents in all fields have been criticized out of their professions due to pessimistic, ignorant, and unloving critics?  The world is filled with simpletons that can ruin the labor of decades in a single day.  There are two ways to have the highest building in town – take the long term effort to build your edifice or take a wrecking ball to all the other buildings in town.  Too many people in our culture take the second approach.

 

Michelangelo took years to finish the Sistine Chapel, but any critic can take a spray can and ruin his work overnight.  Is it fair? Just? Humane?  No, but it is the facts.  All the great achievement is done in our society despite the critics.  Laurie and I decided long ago to be a builder not a wrecker of people’s dreams.  Remember, every critical, unloving word that you say to others may douse the fire of their dream.  On the other hand, every encouraging, lifting, positive word you say may be the gas that lights a person on fire for life.  A leader literally has the power of life and death of dreams in their words.  Choose your words carefully and with love in your heart.  This leads me to my last Network Marketing Creed for the day.

 

5. In Networking and in life, one small positive difference can reverberate through others lives and literally change the world.

 

I will share one other powerful true story from King Duncan’s book.

 

“The date was December 13, 1899.  The Boer Wars were going on in South Africa.  At the time John Howard was an Englishman working near the town of Pretoria.  An English journalist who had escaped from a Boer POW camp knocked on Howard’s door and sought refuge.  Howard took him in, looked after him for a week, and helped him escape back to Europe.”

 

Why would John Howard, a successful English businessman stick his neck out and risk imprisonment to help an unknown reporter?  John, like many in the field of Networking believes that serving others is the right thing to do.  Whether you gain financially or not is secondary to doing what is right regardless of the personal risk! Let’s continue the true story. 

 

 

“Once safely back in England, this journalist wrote a news story about his adventure in South Africa.  It was so gripping that it was carried by newspapers around the world.  In fact, the story was so widely published that the journalist gained international fame that eventually propelled him onto the center stage of politics.  The journalist name was Winston Churchill”

 

Can you see how one small positive difference performed by John Howard led to a part of Winston Churchill’s destiny?  Winton’s destiny was entwined with the destiny of Western Civilization through his defense of freedoms against Nazi tyranny.  Here is my point: One life can and does make a difference in the world.  One of the biggest lies that Satan plays on people is to make them feel that their life doesn’t count!  YOUR ACTIONS IN LIFE COUNT SO MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT!  One small action from you may be the propelling moment in the next Winston Churchill, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr. etc. lives.  Not all of us will be a Winston Churchill, but all of us can be like a John Howard in another person’s life.  Never stop doing what is right and do what is right regardless of the cost.  God Bless, Orrin Woodward

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