LifeSpring

I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize myself.

The face was mine, more or less. My eyes, my nose. But the man was a stranger. Just recently, that man had a mustache. Now he didn't.

For some people, shaving a mustache is five minutes in the bathroom. For me, it felt like stripping naked in public. Pure shock. Confused, scared, and deeply uncomfortable, all at once. There were so many feelings running through me that I couldn't tell which one was in charge.

And it all started with a thousand dollars that refused to turn into more.

The team was growing. The ads worked, people kept coming. But my check had stalled at a thousand dollars a month and wouldn't budge.

The real problem was relationships. There were more and more people, but they never turned into a team.

Still 1994. That's when I first heard about LifeSpring — one of the first big American trainings to reach Russia. Four days, morning to night. Three hundred fifty dollars.

Huge money back then. I didn't have it, so I borrowed it. I decided right away: I wanted to take this training. I remembered those two hours with the student very well.

Then I did something that became a habit of mine for years to come. I signed myself up and immediately started inviting my team. None of that "let me go check it out first, then I'll tell you about it." Right away.

Thirty people went. All together.

I'm not going to walk you through the training day by day. More than thirty years have passed, and besides, you can't really capture these things in a retelling. I'll tell you what stuck with me.

First — that mustache. After day one, I think, they gave us an assignment: make a breakthrough. Something you'd never do on your own. The men, for instance, were told to shave their mustaches.

Sounds funny, right? It wasn't funny to me at all. I shaved it off and stood there in front of the mirror with that same feeling — like I'd stripped naked.

Remember the last chapter? That time, my face changed, and other people saw it first. This time, I was the one looking at my own face, and I didn't recognize it.

The trainer just gave the assignment. I was the one holding the razor.

Second — the game "Red and Black." I won't explain the rules: if you've done it, you remember; if you haven't, you're better off playing it yourself someday. I'll just say this: it was one of the most powerful things I've ever experienced in a training. We went into that game as one set of people and came out as another. All of us.

And third — the end of the training.

By the last day, I looked at my team and didn't recognize it, just like I hadn't recognized myself in the mirror. We'd gotten softer with each other. Friendlier. We'd basically become friends. We'd come together. Learned to love each other exactly as we were. By the end, we were just hugging everyone, and it felt like we were one big family.

Thirty people who, up until then, had never managed to become a team. Now, one family.

Here's where it gets really interesting.

The training worked on almost everyone who went through it. People's attitudes changed — toward each other, toward their business partners, toward their parents, toward their kids.

And once the people changed, the numbers changed too. Sales volume went up. Checks went up. For everyone.

My check went up along with theirs. Three months later it was already three thousand dollars. Three times what it had been.

Let's take another sober look at this. Same as with the student, not a single word about business was said at the training. No comp plan, no product, nothing about how to invite people. Four days about ourselves. And the check tripled.

That's when a formula took shape in my head — one I've lived by for more than thirty years:

Personal growth = income growth.

Want to earn money in network marketing? Grow as a person. You can study the business all you want and do whatever you like. But if you don't grow yourself, none of it will work. You can take that to the bank.

There was something else I understood then. My check didn't grow on its own. It grew because thirty people grew. Someone's relationship with their partners changed, someone else's with their parents, another's with their kids. Everyone grew a little. Together, that added up to triple.

Your check is a mirror of you. It doesn't reflect the company or the comp plan. It reflects you and your team. Change, and the reflection changes too.

Remember the diamond? The student chipped off that first little piece of crust. At LifeSpring, the real cutting began. Thirty diamonds at once, as it turned out.

You're probably thinking right now: there it is, the secret. Go to a good training, bring your team, and your check will grow.

I decided the same thing. And it made perfect logical sense. Check stalled at a thousand — went to a training — became three thousand. Three thousand stalled — time for the next training. From then on, I started hunting down trainings myself and inviting trainers into my team. Over my life, I've been through more than a hundred of them.

Back then, I thought I'd found the recipe.

When three thousand stalled too, I already knew what to do. Find the next training.

That's how I found Mark and Sofia Atlasov — among the first trainers to run trainings specifically for network marketers.

And at one of their trainings, I ran into my black box again.