A Classic Example of Go-Givers Sell More

I'm interrupting my "normal programming" to bring you some time-sensitive news and opportunities. I'll post the rest of my thoughts on love and business tomorrow - I promise!

In the two years I have been coaching and teaching the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success from The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann the most common comment I hear is "that book made me cry, it is EXACTLY how I want to live and do business."

The next thing I usually hear is "I am ALREADY a Go-Giver but... I guess stratospheric success just takes time, huh?"

No, it doesn't just take time. It does, however, take more than giving. Here is what I DO know - being a giver is NOT the same as being a GO-GIVER and it won't get the same results. There are Five Laws in what the character, Pindar, calls his "Trade Secret" because all five are equally important. I am going to use my friend and one of my heroes, Dafna Michaelson, as a classic example of the Five Laws in action. I've included some hints from my coaching program so you can follow her example and see what stratospheric success comes YOUR way!

In 2008 Dafna, who has been in community service and non-profit work nearly all of her adult life, realized that where the government was not providing solutions to community problems there were individuals stepping up all over the country and working at the grass roots level to create solutions. She wanted to document these stories, get some recognition for the community problem solvers and, ultimately, figure out the common ground that would bring their efforts together to strengthen and support them. She left her job, cashed in her 401K - that's right, all of it - and made a commitment; to travel to all of the 50 states in 52 weeks and share the stories of the heroes she encountered through video and blog posts.

She did it. Her 50 in 52 Journey took her all over the nation, but, on December 31, 2009 Dafna celebrated in her home state of Colorado the videos collected from a year of travel. A year of sleeping on the couches of strangers, depending on a GPS sister she lovingly called "Betty" to get her through strange cities and countrysides, having her two kids with her when she was home in Denver and traveling when they were scheduled to be with their father anyway. Her life become an amalgam of the lives she encountered. Her voice became a chorus of "we DID this and we CAN do more" stories from all over the nation.

If there is anything that is hard to sell it is an idea. Well maybe there is one thing that is harder - an idea for how to solve a problem that seems too big to be solved. NO - there is one thing harder that that - an idea that gives the people the power to solve any problem they choose. Yeah - I'd say that one is hard to sell. It's BIG for one thing, the scope is mind boggling. If the scope doesn't blow your mind then the details will. But Dafna has more than an idea - she has a plan and she IS selling it. That is where The Go-Giver and the new book (launching TOMORROW but rumor has it it CAN be found today) Go-Givers Sell More come in.

Today, Dafna was listed in CNN's list of Intriguing People (right after Neda, the young lady whose death became a rallying cry for the Iranian resistance and William Ward Warren, the 15 year old whose COLOR footage of JFK's arrival in Dallas only an hour before his death made news in a time when even seasoned professionals were shooting in black and white.)

Dafna came to the attention of CNN after her 50in52 Journey was documented by CBS Morning News under "Good Deeds Across America." Not only did they follow Dafna on her interviews in the state of Arizona but also interviewed several of the people she had interviewed previously.

Before her story was picked up by national media she was interviewed by several regional programs, including St. Louis' own David Garland on his show The Rise to the Top and Kyle Dyer at 9 News, the NBC affiliate for the Denver area.

Her vision, The Journey Institute, was not only accepted into the Pepsi Refresh Project's Good Idea contest (out of thousands of entries) but has held steady at between 35 and 40th in the rankings after the first two weeks in a field of about 800 contestants. IF this vision pulls into the top first or second spot The Journey Institute will be given $250,000 in funding from Pepsi. (Use the link above if you will to vote daily and boost her ranking.)

How has Dafna managed to generate this exposure, this success and this momentum? It isn't through a powerhouse PR firm. It isn't through friends in high places or high dollar charity dinners. In fact, Dafna has demonstrated how the Five Laws, when applied together to a business idea, results in greater sales - even of an idea too big for most of us to grasp.

Law #1 - The Law of Value

Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.

This is not the counter productive suggestion it might seem to be. Value is conceptual and individual. Your worth to your market will always be what they get OUT of your product or service, NOT the cost that they pay for it or the cost to you to provide it. Dafna's journey and the resulting stories she captured might have little resale value, but for the price of a little time or a donation we get the VALUE of being a part of something much larger than ourselves.

QUESTION: What are you doing consistently as part of your business model that delivers something of value to your market that is more than they expect or pay for?

Law #2 - The Law of Compensation

Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.

Never mind what you are worth - how much money you make depends on your reach and your impact. Will a few people pay you to have a tremendous amount of impact, will a lot of people pay you to have a little bit of impact or will a lot of people pay you to have a tremendous amount of impact? While Dafna may not be taking her compensation in direct salary, the amount of funds she garners to fuel her vision is directly related to reach and impact. The Journey Institute meets both of those challenges head on. Bringing together people from different areas who are working to solve a common problem and equipping them to return to their communities with not only ideas but shared resources and support systems means that everything the Institute does has a ripple effect. Those community problem solvers can now create solutions AND more problem solvers - and so on, and on, and on.

QUESTION: What are you doing as part of your business model that allows you to have greater reach and impact? (I'll give you a clue - this law comes down to the three-legged stool of innovation, replication and delegation.)

Law #3 - The Law of Influence

Your influence is determined by how abundantly you put other people's interests first.

When was the last time you needed to make something happen and you thought "who can I call?" How many people were on that list? That's influence. It doesn't come from a tit for tat cashing in the chips mentality - if you're working on that model I don't want to hear you crying when you've run out of chips to cash in. It comes from abundantly and consistently thinking of others and taking care of them whenever you can.

Dafna and I connected because I saw a tweet (what we twitterholics call a status update on twitter) from Terry Bean, whom I knew, liked and trusted but only through social media (we met on Facebook through a mutual friend) saying that Dafna (whom I'd never heard of at that point) needed to meet people who were active in social media in the Chicago area. I checked out her blog, fell in love with the vision and connected her to my friends Gilbert Melot and Brian Tomkins whom I had met through Extreme Business Makeovers and their project, The Go-Giver Tour. Dafna impressed Terry with her "other-focused" mentality and she benefited from my knowing other people who had influence because they also live and breathe the Go-Giver philosophy. That resulted in some great press in Chicago and, when Dafna traveled to St. Louis, resulted not only in her feature on The Rise to the Top and a spot on the panel for the St. Louis Social Media Club, but I also had the fun of hosting Dafna during her stay and finding out I have yet another sister I had yet to meet.

QUESTION: What are you doing in your business model that keeps you tuned in to the interests of the people you serve, be they clients, vendors, associates, affiliates or your community?

Law #4 - The Law of Authenticity

The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.

No matter what you sell, the experience people have will be determined by how they experience you - and more importantly - how they experience themselves because of you. Dafna gives herself wholeheartedly and unreservedly. Every interview has hours of research and thought behind it, that is her "job." But the connection and rapport she develops during the interview is a result of her complete focus on the person in front of the camera, not of her preparation or skill behind the camera. Her hours of posting on social networks and keeping up with the relationships she has developed all over the country shows a heart that has room for everyone and willingness to share her heart with the world. In my keynote What is YOUR Light, Connecting Passion, Purpose and Presence, I ask the question "What do you do that keeps people coming back for more of you?" Dafna demonstrates it perfectly and with grace; she makes everyone love themselves just a little bit more.

QUESTION: What are you doing to bring YOU into every encounter you have in your business and make people come back for more of YOU?

Law #5 - The Law of Receptivity

The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.

Well duh, we give in order to receive, right? That's how stratospheric success happens. Nope, exactly the opposite. We give with no attachment to a particular outcome and we stay OPEN to receiving and guess what - we end up receiving far more than we would have expected if we HAD been expecting something in return. I'll grant you it is perhaps easier to be open to receiving when you are a non-profit vision rather than a for-profit business. In order to accomplish her goal, Dafna HAD to be open to receiving everything from introductions, meals and advice to cash and checks and credit cards. She receives with gratitude, knowing that the works she does serves and serves well. But unless you cannot say that what you do serves and serves well (and if you can't say that then let me recommend a few other books you might want to read) then why would you not be open to receiving?

QUESTION: How can you be open to receiving without being emotionally attached to an outcome of receiving in direct relationship to what you have given?

There you have it - a classic example of a business model and entrepreneur who is demonstrating that Go-Givers DO sell more. Even when what she is selling is an idea so large and so powerful and so unprecedented that we can't quite see it for ourselves.

If you are ready to master the Five Laws to sell your ideas, your products, your services and yourself you'll want the books (order Go-Givers Sell More this week and you'll have some extras coming that you can't get anywhere else and won't want to miss.)

If you want to apply Law #3 and Law #4 you can give just a few seconds every day between now and February 28th to help boost the Journey Institute to first place in the Pepsi Refresh Project which will give Dafna $250,000 in funding to make this vision a reality!

If you want to peek in on my chats with Dafna we did a blog post together literally through chat - gmail chat to be precise - about the power of connectivity and my interview with her during her St. Louis visit (with the arch in the background thanks to being graciously hosted by Armstrong Teasdale) truly captures the me I hope to live up to someday. I've embedded it below.

If you want to BE a Go-Giver and achieve whatever stratospheric success means to you then please, don't just focus on giving, don't just focus on receiving, learn to apply all five laws in everything you do - THAT is the true "Trade Secret."

The Go-Giver Five Laws - It takes the entire spectrum

Never say never - it finally happened! Everyone who knows me knows I dread getting in front of a camera. It wasn't quite a phobia but a close approximation.

Then I got inspired by the words of a 19 year old entrepreneur whose entry for the Go-Giver tour contest was so authentic, so natural and so dead on that I just had to respond in kind. Watch Michael W. Montgomery's video contest entry and read the comments posted, you'll see what I mean.

Here is my first video, with thanks for the inspiration to Michale Montgomery and authors Bob Burg and John David Mann.




The comments following the post of Michael's video included the question "what law in The Go-Giver can you relate to?"

Michael's response was "Right now I think I relate best with either Value or Authenticity... I'd like to level it out over the whole spectrum of laws but it may take some time."

There is the real secret to stratospheric success - "the whole spectrum" and "it may take some time." See it doesn't take time for the Go-Giver laws to work, but they work only when we work them. So the real question is "how long will it take you to start applying ALL FIVE laws?"

See business success is usually measured by what you GET. Your income, your material wealth, the company's profit, etc... We measure the outcome but we must focus on what we put into achieving the outcome. As Bob Burg says, "shift the focus from getting to giving."

I recapped in the video above some of the highlights from each of the laws that have been the most transformational for me and for my clients.

If you want to know the laws get the book or visit The Go-Giver website. What I'm giving here are just a few of the lessons I've latched onto after a year of coaching the laws.

Law #1 - Ernesto says "Will it make money is not a bad question. It's just a bad FIRST question." In fact, he goes on to say, if the first question you ask is "will it serve" and you can find a way to give a resounding YES as an answer you can't help but make money.

Law #2 - Nicole shares with Joe how the concept she created for a classroom of kids has been translated into a thriving business that now shares that concept with thousands of kids and Joe realizes that it isn't JUST about value - it is also about impact. How many people can you serve and how much impact can you have on those people? Nicole reminds us that this law means that there is no limit on your income because if you are adding significant value you can always find more people to serve.

Law #3 - Sam shares his discovery of how to create an army of Personal Walking Ambassadors. This is a more powerful sales force than you could ever hire or afford to pay.

Law #4 - Deborah tells her audience that even after learning everything there was to know about real estate and about selling she was still desperate and broke. It was only after learning how to share the gift of herself and realizing that 10% of success is achieved through skills and knowledge and 90% is achieved through relationships that she reached stratospheric success. It isn't just about BEING authentic, it is mostly about the willingness to contribute that authentic self to every relationship you make.

Law #5 - Finally Joe meets the "secret guest" and learns the power of breathing in. He realizes that giving is the equivalent of breathing out and that it is not possible to only breathe out and live - you must also breathe in. Further, you can't select the particles of air you take into your lungs, you take every breathe in faith that it will include the oxygen you need to sustain life and create health.

This, then is the secret as shared by a 19 year old entrepreneur. Work toward "leveling out across the entire spectrum" and you can't help but reach stratospheric success.

Why Gurus Don't Live on Mountaintops

I never pictured myself as a guru.

For one thing, they apparently spend a lot of their time at the top of very high mountains. Mountaintops tend to be chilly places and I’m not fond of temperatures below 60 F. Nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.

For another they were always male, serene and scantily clad. I’m female, serene only by extreme discipline and well come on, let’s not go there (especially not at those temperatures.) In fact, the list of why I did not strive for guru status goes on and on and gets much more serious than altitude, weather and wardrobe.

I thought I understood why gurus lived on mountaintops. It was to avoid the throngs of people who wanted to know the secret to “life the universe and everything”. It was to keep from falling victim to the ego trip of knowing you were wiser than the average bear. It was to prevent the world from squandering their hard won insights into what makes the sky blue and the wind blow. Anyone who wanted to share in the guru’s enlightenment had to pay a pretty steep price (or at least climb a pretty steep hill.)

Some of my dearest friends are gurus. Literally. Defined as “a teacher and guide in matters of fundamental concern”. And none of them live on mountaintops.

Because how do you add value from the top of a mountain?

These modern gurus act (and dress) a lot like the rest of us. They bear more resemblance to Pindar in The Go-Giver (written by a couple of my favorite gurus, Bob Burg and John David Mann) than they do to the Hindi leaders of old. What do they do with the secrets, wisdom, insights and enlightenment they have accumulated? They share it.

Like Pindar, they add value to every life they touch.

Their example made it flattering (without these role models it would have been intimidating) to be granted guru status by a couple of recent connections.

My first crack at guru status put me about as close to inhabiting a mountaintop as I want to come but it was (and continues to be) a fantastic experience. The Rise to the Top, hosted and produced by David Siteman-Garland is, as he says, "not your grandpa’s business show". (His description of a "talk show on steroids" is more on the mark.) But David packs it full of humor and solid informaton and augments it with downloadable resources that correspond to each episode. It’s fun, fast and informative!

I got to sit down with David on episode #4; Secrets to building great business and personal relationships and let him grill me about how to “grow your network by 1000%” or something unbelievable like that. You just can’t be nervous taking to David, you’re having too much fun, and he and his film crew were fantastic. They made me look and sound pretty good and then the editor took over and made me look and sound better.

(You can catch it Sunday the 25th on ABC 30 at 11AM or check out the rest of the show times at http://www.therisetothetop.com/.)

Shortly after that show first aired I started hearing myself referred to as a guru.

The next “incident” came through a blog written by Jason Thomas called The Giving Experiment. He references a coffee meeting I had with him and his friend Greg Younger and our host and catalyst for the meeting, Kevin Pannebecker. (Jason, I hope you weren’t really nervous about meeting me and that was just a wee bit of literary embellishment?) Jason has been observing and sharing his experiences in putting the Five Laws to Stratospheric Success from The Go-Giver into action. (He is currently looking to transition his career path into a sales role so if you’re looking for a sales professional who is a go-getter and a Go-Giver I suggest you give Jason a call.)

What did I learn from achieving “guru” status? That everyone is a guru!

Not only have I learned from my friends who have achieved guru status in the eyes of the many, I learn as much or more from the “secret gurus” whose worth has yet to be acknowledged. Let me give you a partial list in no particular order of the gurus who have touched my life in the last week. Some you've heard of and some you haven't but everyone of them is a guru worth getting to know.

Kevin Pannebecker, Bob Burg, Gill Wagner, Dr. William Payne, Lynne Wilhite, Chad Estes, Rachel Lapin, Wendy Gauntt, Thom Scott, Jeremy Nulik, Mercedes Bartlett, Tom Gillaspie, David Meyer, Dan Klein, Brian Schwartz, Chuck Hart, Scott Ginsberg, David Garland, Greg Younger, Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero, Bob Sommers, Ruth Binger, Tammy Dutton, John David Mann and Jason Thomas. That’s right, everyone of these people contributed to my success in just the last week!

We all have knowledge and expertise to share. We all have secrets, wisdom, insights and enlightenment that we have accumulated.

Which means we all have the ability to add value to all of our relationships. And that is the first step on the path to stratospheric success!

Put your best foot forward (actually either foot will do just fine), you can reach stratospheric heights and “rise to the top” without ever setting foot on a mountain.

The Perfect Gift - The “giving season” is upon us – shed some joy where ever you go

Ah, the search for that perfect gift. The one that will light up his or her face, the one that will never be returned or regifted. It’s that time of year again when we know we should be celebrating the joy of the season but we’re stretching our budgets and our time, trying to make sure every person on our list gets from us what they want, what they expect or what they only dreamed of.

We usually end up feeling like we just couldn’t be enough things to enough people which leaves us fetched up on the eve of the New Year too exhausted to make resolutions, let alone keep them, and so deep in debt our first resolution has to be to work harder to pay off the credit cards before next December rolls around.

Not to sound like a cheesy ad for a cosmetic dentist but did you ever consider giving a smile? Doesn’t cost much (unless you’re shopping for the perfect smile instead of the perfect gift), doesn’t take but a second, and it doesn’t need fancy gift wrapping.

When I was very young and very naïve I had a little game I played. It was called “what will it take to make you smile?” I smiled at everyone I met, and sometimes that was all it took. Sometimes it took a little conversation, sometimes it took more than one encounter. But I was out to prove I could make anybody smile.

In my early 20’s I worked at an accounting office in Lawrence, Kansas. The partners all knew about my little game and they told me they knew one client that I could never win against – he would never smile for me or anyone else. This client picked up his accounting every month but he never came in, he just pulled up out front and honked and you had to walk his reports out to his van. He never joked, he never chatted, he never even cracked a smile.

I said, “wanna bet?”

For months I walked out to the van, accounting reports in hand. And for months Dr. B refused to smile. A vet who often had his dogs in the van with him, I thought he might warm up if I let him know how much I shared his love of animals. He thawed a little when he saw that his dogs liked me, but he didn’t smile.

From July to November I played my game, losing to his straight face every month but never giving up. Then came December.

December in an accounting firm is the brink of crazyness. Between month end accounting, year end accounting and gearing up for the impending tax season, holiday parties are an afterthought at best. So I hadn’t even noticed that Dr. B’s accounting was sitting on the shelf. And I certainly wasn’t prepared to look up from my desk and see him standing in the doorway, leaning heavily on a cane and holding a holiday tin in the other hand. He limped slowly to my desk and held out the tin.

He said he wanted me to know how much my cheerfulness meant, especially that last summer when his gout was the worst and he hurt all the time and was embarrassed to try to walk because it was so hard. And he said the chocolates weren’t much but he hoped I had a Merry Christmas.

And little did he know that the true gift he gave me that Christmas was validation – because he was SMILING!

In The Go-Giver the hero, Joe, learns that the Fourth Law of Stratospheric Success, The Law of Authenticity, says the “the most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.” Author Bob Burg recently posted a fabulously amusing and meaningful video on The Go-Giver Blog about validation and the gift that a smile can bring. (Do take time to watch it – it will make you smile which makes it worth the time.)

Dr. B did for me exactly what the hero of that video does for everyone he meets, and what someone finally does for him. He validated the value of ME. Thank you Dr. B – without you I may never have learned how valuable the gift of “me” can be. And worse, I may never have learned how much it means to the giver to have their gift recognized.

Dr. B and I continued to smile at each other. Lawrence is a big little town and we saw each other off and on until I moved away. Even now, every time I feel too tired or too stressed to even smile I think about the effort it took him to get out of his van, the pride it cost him to make his awkward way from the van to my office and the joy it gave me to know that the gift I gave him meant so much.

This holiday season, and throughout the year, no matter how tired or stressed we are please let us remember how powerful a gift we have within ourselves and how easy it is to share it. And let us not forget to give validation to all the people who have given us that gift. You never know when they will look back at that moment of validation we offered and it will be the one thing that puts a smile back on their face. And that is the perfect, never ending gift that you can give anyone any day of the year.

Being Scared Isn't Being Motivated

As motivational techniques go, fear is highly overrated. And yet, it's a trap most people have fallen into at one time or another. We've seen parents, managers, even entire governments try the "if you are frightened enough of the consequences you'll be motivated to do the right thing" trap.

I once sat on a discussion panel with a consultant who told the audience that she thought the number one value she she provided to her clients was to keep the employees on their toes and "put a little fear into them". I told the audience I thought the number one value I provided was to be a resource for the employees to make sure they developed competence and confidence and never had to be afraid of failure. You can imagine how disheartening it was to realize that a large percentage of the managers and employers in the room thought that hiring HER would make their lives easier.

I was, therefore, pretty disappointed in myself when I recently commented to a client that I felt some of the "dis sync" she was having with her ops manager was that this manager was "more afraid of the team than she is of her boss." Right diagnosis, WRONG terminology. My bad.

And I'm happy to say that when my client asked "so what do I do to make her scared of me?" she was (mostly) kidding. Neither of us would want anyone on her team to be afraid of anything because fear of consequences doesn't motivate anyone to do anything more than just enough to avoid the consequences.

And that was exactly what we were seeing in this manager; she was doing what she could to avoid certain consequences, but she was more motivated to avoid the consequences of making anyone on the team unhappy with her than she was to avoid the consequences of not meeting the business objectives. She was asking for increased budgets, pushing back on timelines and making excuses for work from herself and the team that wasn't up to standard. The employees, motivated by a fear of failure and finding an advocate in the manager, were campaigning for a redefinition of success. And the employer, who had a fear of being unreasonable and losing employees, was torn between accepting the lowering of standards and demanding what she knew was essential to provide good value to her customers.

If you've read Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, you've already guessed that this team was dysfunctional in all five areas. They didn't trust each other enough to have conflict, in fact, the manager and the employer were both more scared of conflict with the team than they were of not meeting their objectives. They weren't committed to their goals, in fact the buy in for their goals was so low that everyone was trying to negotiate a new definition for attaining them. Accountability was so low that everyone pointed to everyone else as the reason things weren't getting done and the manager was pointing to the employer as the person setting unreasonable goals. So of course, no one was focused on team outcomes, they were too busy trying to protect their backsides.

Did I just overstate the diagnosis? Maybe, as with any team some days are better than others and some players better than others on any given day. But if you looked at the entire "season" that pretty well describes why they didn't have a winning record.

In this equation everyone was motivated to do what they were doing by a fear of consequences so ALL of them were doing only what was necessary to avoid those consequences. Fear was, in fact, blocking their ability to be truly motivated toward excellence and growth. They were no longer striving to succeed, they were desperately trying not to fail.

To determine if you are building a motivated team ask yourself "what are they striving toward?" If, in fact, they are working harder to "try to avoid" than they are "striving toward" you don't yet have a motivated team, you have a lot of scared individuals.

Defining Irredeemable

I was sitting at lunch with Bob Burg last week and asked him a question. (That’s right, I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been very busy living with no time to comment on it, but some really cool stuff happened during the last two weeks including a great event with Bob Burg, the author of Endless Referrals and co-author of The Go-Giver! I’ll be updating you all in upcoming posts.)

So anyway, back to the question - I asked Bob, “what percentage of people do you think are irredeemable “Go-Takers?” (Go-Takers, as you know if you read Bob’s blog posts at www.thegogiver.com/blog, are the opposite of Go-Givers. Bob defines them in the blog post as “that person who feels almost entitled to take, take, take without having provided value — to the other person, to the relationship, to the process, etc.”)

Well Bob said he didn’t know and I certainly didn’t know, but it got us talking about Go-Takers, belief systems how to know a Go-Taker and how to work with them when the situation demands it. We never did define “irredeemable”, maybe because neither of us likes to think that anyone is an irredeemable Go-Taker, we just know there are some people we won’t be able to reach.

I think a lot of the “yeah, buts” that we hear about being a Go-Giver are either from Go-Takers or from people who have encountered a lot of Go-Takers in their life. We know they’re out there, in the book Joe was a Go-Taker until he met Pindar and decided to give the “Trade Secret” a try. So if Go-Takers are the biggest reason you think that applying the principles of The Go-Giver might not succeed let’s talk about how to recognize a Go-Taker and how not to let them get in the way of your stratospheric success.

Before we start the stereotypes remember this: we are all a “product of our raising” as a client of mine likes to say. I call it programming, some call it nurture, but whatever you call it unless we consciously override that input it will define our belief system and that belief system will define our behavior and our outcome. So when you see someone behaving like a Go-Taker remember that their behavior is only reflecting their belief system and a belief system can be changed if the person is willing.

So here are a few stereotypes I believe are Go-Takers:

The “let’s make it mutually beneficial because I want to be damned sure I benefit” type. This type talks a lot about how they can help you because their belief system says that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” and “you’ve got to give in order to get.” So they start by telling you what they are willing to give or “pay” in order to get what they want. Once they get over the shock of meeting someone who will give just for the sake of giving they are usually pretty easy to convert. In fact, this type is often a disguised Go-Giver who would like to give without keeping score but doesn’t want to be seen as an “easy touch” or who just hates to ask for anything or owe a favor. I still fall into some of these patterns and beliefs so I totally get how this happens.

The “isn’t it nice that you’re having some success, now how can I catch a ride on your coattails” type. This type follows the belief that “it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you” but they don’t really get to know people more than superficially because they are always looking past this encounter to see if there is someone more important they should be meeting. They live on borrowed success, they are quick to name drop and to exaggerate relationships. They pretend to influence they don’t have and commit to making things happen when they can’t deliver. They will do anything for someone they view as higher on the ladder but seldom have time for any relationship they can’t capitalize on. In their concern for making the most out of their contact list they forget that the secret to stratospheric success is all about people – we add value to people’s lives, we serve people, we have influence with people, we offer our personal value and we receive from people. So engaging with an opportunity, with a title, with a status symbol or with anything other than the whole individual will never lead to sustainable, stratospheric success no matter how high on the ladder you climb or whose coattails you catch a ride on.

The “can I negotiate one more drop of blood from this engagement” type. This type buys into the belief that you should never leave a dime on the table, never be a sucker and never miss a chance to add a little to the bottom line. As Ernesto says in The Go-Giver, “will it make money isn’t a bad question, it’s just a bad FIRST question.” It’s also a bad last question. If, as Ernesto says, the first question should be “will it serve” then the last question we should ask might be “did I serve?” Because if we served and made money we weren’t suckers and neither was the other party. Because if, as Bob said in his presentation on Friday, “all things being equal, people do business and refer to people they know, like and trust” then we shouldn’t ask them to do business with us if we were so concerned about being a sucker that we made suckers out of them. (Here’s another belief system that holds true in these economically “troubled” times; “all things NOT being equal, people will STILL do business and refer to people they know, like and trust.” Just something to think about.)

I’m sure there are many more Go-Taker stereotypes and I hope you’ll comment and blog on your experiences with them. But let’s take this last paragraph to think about how to keep them from ruining your success. Bob’s advice was simple, “know who you’re dealing with and plan accordingly.” Yup, that simple. Notice he DID NOT say “act accordingly.” You still follow those 5 Laws to Stratospheric Success. But if you recognize a Go-Taker you will want to also take extra care with your contracts, be clear about the commitments you are making and what you can expect from the other party, pay attention to your gut when it says “you’re being taken advantage of.” And there is nothing that says the path to stratospheric success includes losing, just giving. You aren’t being asked to be a martyr, just a giver and receiver. So if there is nothing in it for you, not even the satisfaction of serving, walk away.

I believe that most people would prefer to be Go-Givers if their belief system supported equating giving and receiving without keeping score and stratospheric success. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be able to redeem every Go-Taker and neither will you.