Can YOU tell the difference between Oysters and Elephants?
By John Counsel
Most people in MLM can’t! John Counsel explains why this ability is so indispensable to your success in an industry where perspective is everything.
An accurate perspective – or viewpoint – is one of the keys to MLM success. It can help you spot traps and pitfalls and find ways to overcome them. It can help you find better ways to present your products or business opportunity to individuals or groups. It can help keep you going when progress is slow, or when bad publicity hits your business, or your people quit.
Perspective is the key to true motivation.
Why?
Because it helps you separate cause and effect. One of the biggest problems human beings face every day is their failure to distinguish between the two.
Let’s consider how this applies in two quite different ways in MLM.
How to spot an Elephant
Have you ever been to a circus and noticed how they keep the elephants from wandering off? Just a single strand of rope fastened to a large peg in the ground! And these are the animals they used to use to raise and lower the tonnes of canvas in the Big Top!
It seems ridiculous that such strong, huge animals can be kept in check by such a flimsy device.
That’s the first mistake.
By thinking that the rope is keeping the elephant in place, we mistake effect for cause.
How?
Because of false perspective. We don’t understand the mental and emotional conditioning the animal has gone through in its infancy.
When an elephant is big enough to stand and walk it’s leg is shackled by a very strong rope or chain to a tree. The baby elephant hasn’t the strength to uproot the tree or break the rope or chain, and it soon forms the idea that this is the way things will always be. So, no matter how big and strong it grows, the moment someone fastens a rope to its leg, it thinks it can’t move.
It’s NOT the rope that shackles the adult elephant. The real shackle is its own mental and emotional conditioning!
How many prospects (and distributors!) do you know who share the same false perspective?
They can’t talk to people, sell products, sponsor or grow in any way because “that’s the way they’ve always been”.
How to spot an Oyster
Most people in the industry approach sponsoring in much the same way as they’d go looking for pearls. They work their frenzied way through a huge pile of oysters, ripping them open in search of the rare pearl. If they’re lucky, they may find one or two in every pile. The discarded oysters are left to rot as the pearl-seeker moves on to the next pile, never realising that pearls are an effect, not a cause, of success. They're also extremely rare — 1 in 50,000 according to Paspaly Pearls of Broome, Western Australia, the world's largest producer of cultured pearls. In another interesting parallel, pearl divers tend to die young because of the high risks involved. It's life-threatening. It's the same with network marketers who share the same approach. They die early because they can't find enough "pearls" quickly enough to build their businesses.
The Japanese realised long ago that pearls are the result (effect!) of the oyster coating an irritation – such as a pebble or grain of sand – until the irritant is smooth and round, and no longer troubles the oyster. So they began inserting small pebbles and grains of sand into barren oysters, putting the shell back into the water, waiting patiently, then returning to reap a harvest from virtually every oyster they seeded.
How does this help us in MLM?
Knowledge is power. When we really understand what makes things work, our perspective is far more accurate, and we’re less likely to confuse cause and effect. We see things as they really are — not as we think they are, or what others think.
So, when a prospect or downline tells us that they couldn’t possibly move away from their established viewpoint, “comfort zone”, etc., we can immediately recognise what’s going on… they’re just a victim of their own past conditioning. People have told them they can’t do these things, often enough for them to come to believe that it’s true. Just like the elephant.
Or, when we discard people who aren’t “hot prospects”, instead of ensuring that we plant an effective seed, then place them carefully back into the water – where we know they’ll still be in a few months, even years – we guarantee there will be no future harvest to come back to.
By making certain that we protect the relationship, even though they’re not ready (yet), and give them something to think about that really “gets under their skin”, we give ourselves an infinitely greater chance of success with those individuals when they finally reach the point where they turn that “irritation” they’ve been slowly coating into a pearl of real value.
Whose perspective is false?
In both cases, someone’s perspective needs to change. In the case of the prospect who’s an “elephant”, it’s the prospect who needs to be shown a more accurate view of reality.
In the case of prospects who are like “oysters”, it’s your own perspective, attitude and behaviour that need an urgent rethink, because your wasteful, selfish, exploitative approach is not only damaging your own business in the short term, it’s ultimately destroying the industry itself because of the poor public perception it creates.
If you can’t tell the difference between “elephants” and “oysters” in this business, it’s time to either learn, or accept the inevitable consequences – failure and misery. You need to learn to distinguish between cause and effect, between symptoms and disease. Only when your own perspective is accurate and reliable can you hope to build a secure MLM business by teaching it to your people.
© 1995 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. This page updated 1 October 2005.
