Kick It Up!

Kick It Up!

Now that you are getting an understanding of how Fusion Points™ work, as chef Emeril Lagasse would say, “Let’s kick it up a notch!”

There is an additional way to unlock some amazing power that will turn your Fusion Points™ into long-lasting and self-sustaining energy.
To explain, allow me to tell you the story of the moment when a struggling young man found his most important Fusion Point.

It was a cooler than normal day in north Texas.

A slow drizzle was falling, and the sound of raindrops could be heard dancing on the tin roof above the front porch. It was a sound that reminded the young man standing there of the roll of waves hitting the beach, or maybe the trickle of water passing over the rocks in a mountain stream.

This would have been relaxing to almost anyone.

But it was not relaxing to him.

He wasn’t a quitter—not by anyone’s standard. But he truly felt defeated.

Over the previous eighteen months, he had seen his financial outlook worsen to the point that bankruptcy was advised. He had been out of work for a couple of months and had moved his family into living conditions that he considered deplorable. He had now chosen a career in commission-only sales in a business that he believed to have potential, but at this early stage had not provided a consistent income stream.

All of those things were tough, but they weren’t the reason he was standing out on the front porch in the rain.

All of the events of the prior eighteen months were not why the serenity of what should have been a peaceful moment was lost in his mind.

Those events weren’t why a grown man couldn’t stop crying.

Only a few minutes earlier, that same man was inside the mobile home trying to explain to his wonderful and precious daughters why their bicycles had been taken away.

Not only were they gone, but also the reason they were gone was his fault.

The bicycles were a casualty of the war he had been losing for almost two years.

And he couldn’t afford to buy replacements for them.

So there he stood, on the front porch of a rundown mobile home, in the middle of a north Texas rain.

Sounds pretty sad, doesn’t it? It does to me because I lived through it. That was my personal story.

Yes, that was a tough day, and yet, more than twenty years later, I can tell you that it was one of the best moments that ever happened to me in my sales and business ownership career.

“Why?” you may ask.

Because two very important things happened on that day.

The first, I got mad and drew a line in the sand for me.

No more failure! No more mediocrity! No more excuses!

No more!

On that day, I made some serious choices for me and my family. On that day, my career began to grow, and it never stopped again until I retired from my sales leadership position in order to write and travel the country to speak on sales and sales leadership.

And second, on that day I learned something that turned temporary motivation into self-sustaining energy.

There had been other times in my life when I had refocused my attention on my goals. That attention came with a serious commitment to accomplishing those goals. Many of those goals were accomplished.

But that day was different. The decisions I made on that day did not fall by the wayside. The motivation I felt on that day did not grow weaker as time passed.

Why was that day different?

“Why?” is the question.

“Why!” is also the answer.

In my particular case, the emotions I felt deeply over the eighteen months leading up to that day were predominantly negative. I was employed by a company that was sold to a competitor. Without getting into too many details, that change of employers did not work out very well for me. I became resentful. I became frustrated. And I became angry.

I allowed those negative emotions to carry more weight than my positive emotions. I combined those emotions with the logic of needing to make a career change. That combination of logic and negative emotions created a collision point in my life. I quit my job (in a not-so-nice fashion) and went through a period of unemployment.

Even after finding the company and career that would end up becoming my true calling in my professional life, the effects of that collision point caused me to get a slower start than I should have gotten.

But on that day in the north Texas rain, I realized how much I was letting my family down. I found my “why.” My “why” was that my family needed me to get it together and take care of them. I just couldn’t let my daughters down again.

“FusionPoints™ are those unifying moments when logic and positive emotion merge and ignite, creating commitment, energy, and acceleration.”

– Jeff C. West

However, on that day, FusionPoints™ rose to a new level in me.

Deep inside me, finding my “why” turned what had been temporary motivation into self-sustaining energy.

Finding your “why”—finding your deepest passions—will create your most powerful Fusion Point.

QUESTION: What makes the battle worth the fight for you?