Mary Christensen, The Power Of One

Direct Sales Radio – Transcribed

Over the years I have been asked on several occasions for the CashFlowShow training topics to be transcribed for the hearing impaired.  With many hours of CashFlowShow – Direct Sales Radio content available in audio form coupled with a constant need for blog content, I decided to give it a shot with some of our training and leadership interviews.

Tell Direct Sales Consultants = Hearing Impaired Content

If you have any friends who are hearing impaired and in the direct sales industry please spread the word that the www.CashFlowShowRadio.com is now being offered in text form. Believe it or not, an hour long audio recording transcribes into more than 19 pages!!

That is too much for one post. I guess the plan is to make each interview into a series. We will see how this goes. Please put any comments or suggestions below as we are looking for input and ideas on how this may be most useful to YOU!

Mary Christensen, The Power Of One Direct Sales Keynote

Mary Christensen is one of my favorite direct sales speakers. We interviewed Mary in October of 2011. The Power Of One is her most popular keynote address.

DEB BIXLER: Good evening, everybody! Welcome to cashflowshowradio.com. This is Deb Bixler and we are proud to be broadcasting worldwide. Thank you for joining us tonight.

I have a very special guest tonight. We are talking with a very good friend of mine tonight who is Mary Christensen, and she is the number one direct selling author and speaker worldwide. Welcome to the call, Mary.

MARY CHRISTENSEN: Thank you so much, Deb; very excited to be on.

DEB BIXLER: Yeah. Well, I was really excited when you agreed to join us tonight. We’ve been having a terrific lineup of speakers. Tonight, Mary is going to give us her most powerful keynote address, The Power of One, and she’s a very inspirational speaker. She has walked the walk and talked the talk as well, and she has a credibility of success in every aspect of direct sales and leadership. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been interviewing different direct sales leaders who are awesome recruiters. Well I can tell you that Mary left her teaching job to become a direct sales representative and she became a superstar because she sponsored over 1,000 distributors in her first year. Holy cow, Mary!

MARY CHRISTENSEN: [Laughter] Second to [unintelligible - 00:03:03] Deb!

DEB BIXLER: That’s something, I’ll tell you. Well, so this is your most popular and inspiring presentation that you offer is what I understand, so we’re really excited about it. Can you give us a little bit more background about yourself before we get started?

MARY CHRISTENSEN: Sure. And for those of you who haven’t heard me before, the first thing you will notice if you’re based in the United States is I do have a slight accent and that’s because I consider myself an American in training. But if you’re calling in from Australia and New Zealand or England, you’re going to find that accent very easy. But I don’t want the accent to distract anyone, Deb. Because I’ve been in this business so long, I’m definitely going to have to start lying about it. Just to give you a short background because, Deb, you’ve explained what I’m doing now as an author and as a keynote speaker. But what got me to direct selling, I grew up poor; my dad was a violent alcoholic, so I pretty much grew up with zero confidence in myself and zero belief, and that was how the first part of my life worked out. I got married very young — I was 20 — but I had this dream of owning my own home and being a perfect mom; it very much was a dream. So what happened to me? I was 24; I was married; I had a mortgage; and I was mom to two beautiful small children: my son, David, who is just a few weeks old and my daughter, Nikki, who is 2. And then no surprises considering how low my self-esteem was, I actually became the sole provider for my family.

So the reason I’m sharing that with you, Deb, tonight is that up until that point my life had been all hope and dreams, and when you don’t have… when hope is your life plan you don’t make the best decisions. So all of a sudden I had to step up and being that provider for my kids I had to be the mom my kids deserved and I had to make money at the same time, and actually that’s when I discovered direct selling. I’ll tell you a little bit more about it later on how I discovered it, but it absolutely changed my life and I was able to stop wearing my past as some sort of trophy to victimhood and I really was able to give myself permission to succeed. And one of the biggest things, Deb, is I stopped waiting for things to get better and I started making myself better.

DEB BIXLER: Absolutely, yes, and that’s… I was listening to your story because our backgrounds, I didn’t… yeah, we all have a sad childhood! [Laughter] There’s something back there for everybody and so I was just waiting to hear how you really did get into direct sales because that really interests me.

Mary Christensen’s Direct Selling Success Story

MARY CHRISTENSEN: Okay. Well, yes, the direct selling story and I think there’s a wonderful quote, Deb, that somebody said is, “A good childhood is hardly worth having.” I think it was an Irish writer and I thought that was so funny — a good childhood, everyone, is hardly worth having. That for me, I had trained as a teacher before I got married. I’ve given it up to become that perfect mom, that dream that I had. But I trained as a teacher and when I realized that I needed to do something to pay the bills for my kids, I went straight back teaching and that lasted a very short time. And anyone who’s on this call today whether you’re a mom or a dad, you will know how it feels to get your children up in the morning, get them fed, get them dressed, try to ignore any signs that things aren’t just perfect, and get them to the babysitter so you can go and do a day’s work, and that’s how my life became. I was a full-time teacher; I was a part-time mom at best.

And I remember, Deb, I used to drive home from school thinking I’m going to make it up to my kids for being like this but the reality was I became quite robotic; it was like feed them, play with them, read to them, bathe them, and put them into bed. So I knew I had to do something different — I had no idea what.
For me, I happened to read a notice in a local free paper and the notice said, “Work from home,” and I felt, “Wow, that seems interesting!” I picked up the phone, I called the number, and the woman I spoke to was so kind, she said, “I’m going to come and see you this evening.” And I remember being so thankful that she would come and interview me so quickly. Well, that night a very well-dressed woman walked into my house and interviewed me; it could not have been more than 20 minutes and you’re not going to believe this: I got the job!

DEB BIXLER: [Laughter] Yeah, I was going to say you got the job, right?

MARY CHRISTENSEN: Oh, absolutely, but at that instance I went… I did have to do a few more weeks teaching to work out my employment, but basically from that time on I really learned what I think direct selling stands for and that is I got to be the mom my kids deserved and a successful business entrepreneur at the same time.

And it wasn’t all successful at the beginning; I made some horrendous mistakes. I remember at one point discovering that the neighbors had begun calling me “Scary Mary” because I was out on the prowl with my kids and my products and my catalogs and they…

DEB BIXLER: [Laughter]
MARY CHRISTENSEN: Oh, that was humiliating at the time — Scary Mary — but the great thing about this business, everyone, is a couple of things, and it may sound tough but if it’s not working for you it’s because you’re not doing enough. I was certainly doing enough — or you’re doing the wrong things, and that’s the category I fell into. So a bit of advice for those of you who are listening to this call right now, we do get to control our income, we do get to control our decisions; but that also involves saying, “If it’s not working for me, I’m not doing enough or I’m doing the wrong things.”

DEB BIXLER: Right. Well, so if you could give one key step for our listeners to grow their business, what would that be to get started?

Direct Sales Goals

MARY CHRISTENSEN: Look, there is one step that we all have to take and you can’t speed this one through. Deb, it’s finding a goal that makes your heart leap because everything about your direct sales business is driven by goals. If you don’t know what it is you want, why it is you’re doing this, I promise you this: You are going to trip up the first time somebody lets you down, and believe me, that’s going to happen; this is Planet Reality we work in. People are going to let you down. We’ve all driven right across town for a host who promised at least 15 guests and you turn up and she’s sitting on the couch with one very angry-looking mother-in-law. We’ve all had the prospect who says, “I’m definitely signing,” and then as the date draws near all of a sudden she seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth and even the FBI couldn’t find her. We all have those things happening but if you have a goal that is so exciting that you feel an immediate emotional, almost instinctive response to it, I promise you this: no doubt, no distraction, no dream stealer, no disappointment, even an economic downswing. None of those things are going to stop you because that goal… everyone is going to have a magnetic energy that keeps you focused; you can see it.

But I do have some rules on goals because some of you are thinking, “Well, we get taught about goals at our conventions. We understand that.” I want to introduce just a couple more thoughts about goals and the first one is, particularly if we have a lot of women on this call… what I find is that men are great at focusing; when they want something it’s like the blinkers go on and you go for it. Women, we pride ourselves on being able to multitask; we’re constantly doing several things at once, and we’re proud of it. But the fact is, multitasking can be a sabotage — you can’t multitask goals. Just imagine setting out two or three goals like it was a firing range and trying to hit them all at the same time — not possible. You shoot one goal.

Another thing about goals, Deb, make sure they have no more than a one-year timeline because if they’re more than a one-year timeline, pretty much they’re dreams; it has to be something you can achieve now. So my little rule I want to share: one goal, one year, one step at a time — that’s what you need to grow your business.
DEB BIXLER: One goal, one year, one step at a time.

MARY CHRISTENSEN: Yes.

DEB BIXLER: Well, so we’re like probably about a minute… a little over a minute until our break, so what if they don’t… how does that emotionally connect like if they can’t come up with their big emotional connection?

MARY CHRISTENSEN: I think you have to. For me, it was pretty obvious it was keeping my children in their home, not the story in their lives and paying the bills. So everyone, if you’re having trouble with those goals, think about it. Just say to yourself, “What difference would an extra, say, $20,000 a year make in my life?” “If I won the lottery, what would I do with it?” “If I could make one family dream come true, what would it be?” “If I could make one personal wish come true, what would it be?” How many of you are driving the car you can afford and not the car you deserve? Just dig deep because if you have a small goal it’s going to have all the firepower of a flat battery.

And leaders — I know we have a lot of leaders on this call, Deb, you attract such great people — you have to have a goal too. Never fall in to that, “Oh, I’m just doing it for my team now” because you can’t be an inspiring leader unless you’re inspired.

DEB BIXLER: Right, excellent. Okay, very good. Well, so after this break we’re going to talk more about what the next step is in goals, in the Power of One with Mary Christensen. This is Deb Bixler and you’re listening to the cashflowshowradio.com. We will be right back.

[Break-Music]

Download Your The Power Of One – Transcribed Mary Christensen

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