An Immigrants Mindset

A year ago I was grossly underachieving in my business.

Don’t get me wrong, I was a very successful coach and skills trainer working with six and seven figure income earners and their teams, but like many people I was operating under limiting beliefs of my own potential.  I began to see that I was thinking small, and was capable of contributing on a much larger scale if I could just get out of my way.  This is a pretty common thought, right?

Like many people, I didn’t know what was missing in order for me to be firing on all cylinders, but when I began to proclaim every morning that I was ready for more, that I was capable of more, and that I would keep my eyes, ears, heart and head open to the answers, that’s when breakthroughs began to happen that unlocked my potential.

Then one night I stumbled upon a powerful PBS documentary entitled,“Triangle Fire” and it caused a massive breakthrough for me.  This was all I needed to connect some dots in my mind as to what was missing.  This documentary tells the hair-raising story about the deadliest work place accident in New York City’s history, where in 1911 over 100 people were killed in a Greenwich Village sweatshop.   Most of those killed were immigrant women and girls.

“Their families had fled Europe and had come to America for a promise of a better future.  But even the youngest daughters knew that their precarious hold on the American dream depended on their willingness to work.

“Economic security WAS the American dream for many of them.  Money was needed to put food on the table, or to not have to worry about paying the weekly rent.  It was a 14-hour work day for $2 a day, six days a week.”

I must have replayed that part of the documentary ten times as I reflected on this concept of the American dream, and that an immigrants precarious hold on it was hinging on their willingness to work.

This is an immigrant’s mindset.

Think about the journey of an immigrant:  The place they left behind was known and real to them, but they desired more.  They knew they were capable of more.  They had the courage to step into a place of uncertainty with no promise of the outcome. They put their future, and the future of their family in the hands of hard work, gritty determination, great personal sacrifice and the belief that the thing they were going towards was better than the place they had left.

This immigrant mindset was true at the turn of the century, it was true when the Puritans came over and it still holds true today.

I was riding in a cab recently with an immigrant from Somalia.  He was working six days a week, 12 hours a day.  When I asked him why he was working so hard, he told me he was saving money to go to college and study health sciences.  When I asked him what he liked to do for fun, he told me he liked to go to the library and read.  When the time came that he could afford school he didn’t want the language barrier to stand in his way.  When I asked him how much longer until he could afford it, he had calculated it down to the day and knew exactly how to resource scholarship and grant money.

Now think about your business.  Can you say that you have an immigrant’s mindset?

I’ve coached hundreds of direct selling distributors and one thing is clear, most of us have a hairy audacious goal for our life but many of us will find any reason to bump our business off the priority list.  This is the difference between a hobbyist and a professional.  Hobbyists are cool, nothing wrong with them; just make sure your goals are in alignment with your actions.

The promise of our industry is real and achievable if you want it, but far too many are underachieving it.  Why?  Either we are oversimplifying the process, we have a sense of entitlement, we thought it was going to be easier or we’re just plain lazy.  (Just sayin’).

Breakthroughs happen every day in many different ways to people in this industry.  It could be that you heard something for the 103rd time and it finally clicked.  But one thing is certain, you have to be ready to receive.  That’s the key.

I was ready to receive when I heard the words that the precarious hold on the American dream depended on their willingness to work.  I realized that I didn’t have the luxury of standing still and waiting for ‘it’ to happen. As a single mother, the choice that many take of standing still was not an option for me.  Besides, my mother immigrated to the United States from the Azores when she was 14 so it’s part of my family’s fabric and my DNA to work hard.

Sacrifices happen around my house everyday.  Would I love to cook dinner every night and sit around the table talking about our day?  Absolutely, and it does most nights.  But on the occasion when I have a Webinar or a training call scheduled in the evenings, my children know that they have to make their own thing happen until I’m done.

Cereal for dinner?  Awesome!  That’s the way we roll when we have our immigrant mindset dialed in.  They participate in the discussion of why I’m working like a monkey on crack, what’s at stake if I don’t, and how we’re going to celebrate when we achieve a desired goal.

So ask for what you want, be open to receiving it, use your eyes, ears, heart and head to recognize the breakthroughs, pull your family into the plan, and work with an unstoppable immigrant’s mindset like your life depends on it.