Part Four of a Four Part Series
The Fulfilment Spiral
In this last of four articles — and the lead-in to the next 4-part series — John Counsel of The Profit Clinic MLM Success Centre explains the Fulfilment Spiral's powerful role in retailing, sponsoring and personal development for you and your downline team.
By John Counsel
The Fulfilment Spiral is the simplest and most powerful model I know of for getting the results you want in life. Not just in network marketing. In every part of life. Once you really understand it, and how to apply it, your results can soar to the kind of heights you only dream about.
For example, some of you know my personal success rate when it comes to either retailing MLM products or sponsoring new MLM distributors. It's actually better than 100%.
Hard to belive, isn't it? Yet I can back it up with solid data from over more than a decade. That's how long I've been using this high powered concept. And it's the Fulfilment Spiral that's made that kind of "strike rate" not only possible, but absolutely real. So, as you can imagine, I use it all the time, and I teach it to as many of my people as are willing to learn and apply it.
Yes, incredibly, there are people in my downline team who think it's a waste of time. I can guarantee you one thing, though... I wasn't the person who sponsored them!
Eight Essential Steps
In Part Three I concluded with the notion that vision is the most crucial factor for our success. Once we achieve success, our own vision has been turned into living reality — and our new reality becomes the personal vision for those we sponsor. THIS is what makes network marketing so powerful as a business model.
Whenever human beings are involved, the Fulfilment Spiral reveals the cause and effect relationships at work, and allows you to be in control of the process so that you can achieve the best possible win-win outcome.
Once you understand this process, and begin applying it, it can transform your results and transport you to unprecedented success, predictably and safely. To understand it properly, there are some vital principles you need to know about, so that you can comprehend what's going on, in processes that are usually unseen except for the outcomes.
Underlying Principles
1. The Principle of Keys
At every stage of a process there are invisible barriers. Until we can identify those individual barriers, find the keys that will unlock them and perform the specific actions that will turn each key, our progress will be blocked.
There are eight stages in the Fulfilment Spiral. We'll examine each one in accordance with this principle.
2. Rational, Emotional and Physical Dimensions
Human beings are made up of three crucial dimensions — the mind, the emotions and the body. (For those religiously inclined, let's agree to equate the mind and the spirit for the purpose of this discussion. As Paul writes in 2 Timothy 7: "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.")
These are what enable us to think, feel and act. They affect our motives, attitudes and behaviour. When we're in control, our motives are the result of determination — we think through the issues involved, rationally, seeking the most accurate perspective on the available facts and create a clear vision of the reality that will exist at the end of the process — the Fulfilment Spiral.
We then make an emotional commitment in terms of values and attitudes — we dedicate ourselves and our resources to realising that vision. Our emotions and attitudes are brought into balance by correct perspective.
We then discipline ourselves, in terms of behaviour and performance, to invest the time, effort and resources needed to realise our vision, and to meet our unmet needs. (Any absence of personal control is defined by our unmet needs.)
This meeting of our unmet needs is what puts us in control. Once more, the three dimensions are involved…
We gratify our physical appetites
We satisfy our rational needs
We fulfill our emotional desires and expectationsNote the precise terminology and meanings. We'll be using these terms and meanings throughout this series. It's essential that you're familiar with them.
3. Motives versus Emotions
Despite the similarities in spelling, motives are not the same as emotions. This will be spelled out clearly in the next part on personal control and mastering fear.
Motives are rational. They're about control, the mind, thinking, knowledge and correct perspective. They're about WHY we do the things we do and say.
Emotions are not rational. They're about influence, feelings, attitudes, values and balance.
But nothing works in isolation. They all impact on each other. So there's an emotional dimension to everything rational and physical in human beings. Most importantly, how we FEEL — our emotional fulfilment — is what drives us to translate those feelings into action. We need to tell and show others how we feel, good or bad, depending on the amount of either elation or disappointment we experience.
The Concept
This model shows a map of a landscape divided by a deep chasm. On the left hand side is everything we desire — freedom, personal control, happiness, peace, security, abundance. It rises from #5 to the top at #8, from where it overlooks every part of the landscape.
On the right hand side, the landscape rises from deep in the pits of despair (#1) to the narrowest part of the chasm (#4), where the two sides of the divide are at the same level. This is the only place at which it's possible to cross from one side to the other — but it requires a leap of faith to do so: the chasm is bottomless, and the risk is daunting.
There are eight stages in the process. Numbered areas represent different emotional states, or conditions, where we remain until the arrowheads, representing motives, move us from one emotional condition to the next.
The upward spiral is shown more clearly in this more stylised version.
The five numbered areas represent the static human emotional conditions:
#1 = Fear
#3 = Desire
#5 = Relief
#6 = Trust
#7 = Elation/JoyThe three arrowheads represent the three human motives that move us from one emotional state to the next. (5, 6 and 7 are a 3-in-1 chain reaction where the momentum keeps us rolling from one to the next to the next once we land safely on the other side of the chasm.)
Once we arrive at #7, the ultimate human motive (#8) is triggered automatically, like billiard balls, and we find ourselves back where we started, but from a much higher vantage point at the top of the spiral, where we see the whole process from an entirely new perspective.
We now see clearly the cause-and-effect relationships at work. Now we understand both how and why people think, feel and act as they do, and how to help them make the vital transitions from one emotional state to the next.
We're now products of the process. We now begin to operate from a position of strength and knowledge — but one that's tempered by our new motive (#8) so that we never abuse our position in an effort to exploit those on the other side.
Fear of loss, which lies behind ALL negative emotions and attitudes, doesn’t exist on the left hand side of the Fulfilment Spiral. So the risks and unmet needs (absence of personal control) that create fear of loss simply don’t taint our newfound motive (#8). If they do, we've been kidding ourselves... we haven't yet left the other side. We're still there. We just THINK we've crossed the chasm.
This is the process so succinctly identified by T. S. Eliot in these four lines from his 1942 poem “Little Gidding”...
“We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”In the following parts of what will be a new series we’ll explore each aspect of the Fulfilment Spiral in detail, and see how it applies in our businesses — and how we can make it work with maximum benefit for all concerned.
Next: The Fulfilment Spiral Part 1 — How to Master Your Fear.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
© 2002 John Counsel. All rights reserved. No reproduction by any means permitted without prior written consent of the copyright owner. This article appeared originally in Australian Business & Money-Making Opportunities magazine.
©1998 The Profit Clinic. All rights reserved.
